THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CHRISTOPHER KIRKLAND.

CHAPTER I.

I WAS born before the age of railroads, steamboats, electric telegraphs,
or the penny post; and when society in the remote country districts of England
was very little changed from what it had been a hundred years before. In those
days living was simple, locomotion both difficult and restricted, and absence
from home a rare event, save for
page: 2 the grandees
who were bound to be in London for their place in Parliament or for their
attendance at Court. Women of the upper middle class kept their houses and
looked after their children with more vigilance of personal superintendence than
now; and if there was less taste there was less finery, nor was extravagance
made into an æsthetic virtue as it is in these present times. The religious
revival had not begun for the nation at large; for all that Wesley and Whitfield
had done good work among the rough men of the West, and had transformed a large
proportion of the Cornish miners and fishermen from brutalized savages and
wreckers, among whom the King's writ did not run, into God-fearing and
law-abiding citizens. Education was at its lowest possible ebb—though local
grammar-schools in the North were plentiful, kept up by old-time grants and
bequests from former founders and benefactresses;
page: 3 though Robert Raikes had established Sunday-schools here and there, where
minds had begun to awaken to the need of saving souls; though Joseph Lancaster
had got a fair trial for his system of teaching; and though even infant-schools,
which we generally believe to be emphatically of modern establishment,
languished feebly in certain populous places. Still, none of these waves of
progress, as yet slow and sluggish, though gathering, as they went, the volume
and power we know of, had stirred the stagnant shallows of remote country places
at the time of which I write; and society, as found on the moors, in the dales,
and in the villages among the mountains, was satisfied with the most elementary
knowledge for the so-called educated classes and absolute ignorance for all the
rest.

The Reform Bill, Catholic emancipation and the emanacipation of slaves, the
political rights of the Jews, free trade and a free
page: 4 press, were all as yet the golden apples of liberty
and justice held in the closed hand of Time. The press-gang was a recognised
institution; felony was punishable by death—and stealing sheep, as well as any
article the value of thirteen-pence halfpenny from the dwelling-house, was
felony. Though Howard's remonstrances had had some effect, and Coldbath Fields
prison had been built in accordance with his views, our gaols were in general a
disgrace to civilization, and our laws were still justly stigmatized as ‘written
in blood.’ Monday morning hangings were part of the week's ordinary work; and my
father just remembered to have seen thirteen men hanging in a row at Tyburn,
with never a murderer among them. Besides slaves in Jamaica, we had
climbing-boys, who were substantially slaves, for our chimneys at home; and
apprentices were still greatly needing the protection they did not get till
comparatively the other day.
page: 5 Gipsies and
vagrants were laid by the heels at the will of the authorities; and to be
homeless was of itself a qualification for the stocks. Belief in the divine
right of Kings; in the saintly martyrdom of Charles I.; in the criminality of
Cromwell and the hypocrisy of Puritanism; in the good cause of Charles Edward;
in the diabolical origin of the French Revolution, of which the echoes still
reverberated through the awakening world; in the infinite iniquity of Bonaparte;
in the capacity of any one Englishman to lick three ‘mounseers’ single-handed;
as well as belief in the damnable instincts of the ‘many-headed monster,’ as the
people proper were generally called—formed part of every true gentleman's creed.
He who thought differently was either a traitor to his order or no true
gentleman at all. Party spirit in the country ran as high as it ever ran in
Florence or Verona, when Guelfs and Ghibellines slew peace and humanity between
them;
page: 6 and no man with a soul to be saved
would have consorted in friendship with a wearer of the hostile colour. As well
ask Juliet for Romeo, as ask of a Tory father his daughter in marriage for the
son of a Whig, when the one sported blue and the other purple and orange, while
brickbats were flying and bribery stalked about the contested town with never a
mask to hide its face nor a cloak to conceal its hands.

Our family house was for many years in one of the most primitive of those
untouched country districts of which I first spoke; and the recollections of the
elders of my own generation carry us back to a wonderful state of things.

My father was a clergyman and the holder of two livings. The second, of which I
shall speak farther on, was one of the most beautiful places in England, where
the ordering of life was simple and homely, but not more than this. The other
was a
page: 7 large, rambling, sparsely-populated
parish, where the people were half-savages, and where the very elements of all
that makes our modern civifization were wanting. Not a school of any kind was in
the place, though there was one at the quaint old market-town some few miles
away; but in return, for a village of about three hundred inhabitants, there
were seventeen public-houses and jerry-shops; and the man who did not get drunk
would have been the black swan which the white ones would soon have pecked to
death. No one, however, tried the experiment of sobriety. There was no sense of
public decency, no idea of civic order and as little private morality. The
parish-constable would have thought twice before taking up a crony for any
offence short of murder; and then he would have left the door of the lock-up
ajar. Not a man would have held himself justified in marrying before the woman
had
page: 8 proved her capacity for becoming a
mother; and when the lovers were united according to the law of the land—just in
time to legitimize the child—the customs and ceremonies of the day were almost
as brutal as, and certainly more drunken than, those of the North American
Indians or Tierra del Fuegians. Indeed, they were evident survivals of those
primitive times when the bride was taken from her tribe by force and compelled
to submit to violence, before dawning civilization made the whole matrimonial
transaction a matter of sale and barter. But for the most part the young people
slipped by night across the border to Gretna Green, preferring, as they said,
the blacksmith's forge to the joiner's shop, and liking the mock romance of a
pseudo-elopement which saved the parson's fees and the wedding-dinner, and thus
‘gave folk less cause for clack.’

If the people were thus uncivilized, their
page: 9
appointed pastors and masters in the off-districts were very little better.
About eight miles from Braeghyll, my father's parish, was a God-forsaken
moorland incumbency, the ‘priest’ of which was in no wise beyond his flock
either in refinement or morality. As Braeghyll was the mother-parish, our
village was naturally the local metropolis where the inhabitants of the
surrounding hamlets found their pleasures and excitements. These were for the
most part ‘murry-neets’—dances in barns and public-houses, where the men got
drunk, the women fuddled, and the marriage ceremony was discounted all round—and
the Saturday-night fights, which came as regularly as the Sunday-morning shave.
To these fights the priest of Moss Moor, of whom I have spoken, came more
punctually than he went to his own little chapel the next day. He was a fine,
stalwart fellow, who kept up his muscle by week-day working in the fields,
page: 10 like any hired herd or ploughman; and,
‘stripped to buff,’ as the phrase was, he took his turn like a man, did his
fighting gallantly, then got drunk with the best; and so was trundled home to
his stone cabin in the wilds, to sleep off his intoxication in time for his
ragged duty to-morrow morning. My father's curate himself brought his unwedded
wife to the parish and married her about three weeks before the child was born.
No one thought the worse of them for their impatience; and, ‘Nae, what!’ they
said with the broad charity of moral kinship, ‘young folk will be young; and men
and women are kittle cattle to shoe ahint!’

Accustomed to such ministers as these—men who were intellectually in advance of
their flock only in so far as they could read and write, but whose example was a
direct encouragement to both lawlessness and vice—the people of these wild
districts would
page: 11 not brook interference nor
admonition from such gentlemen as might be appointed to the mother-parishes. My
father tried to bring about a better state of things when he first undertook the
care of these shaggy souls at Braeghyll; but the men swore at him, and
threatened to do him a mischief if he did not hold his noise, when he rebuked
them for their intemperance or tried to stop their brutal excesses; and the
women jeered him, for a Molly who put his nose where he had no concern, when he
would have taught them a little modesty as maidens and decency as wives. Thus
the heart was taken out of him; and, being naturally indolent, he soon dropped
the reins which at first he had attempted to hold, and the parish went on as it
would without let or hindrance from him. They were more respectful to my mother,
who was sweet and gentle and very beautiful; and who was, moreover, assimilated
to the every-
page: 12 day experience of her sex by the
rapid ‘bairn-bearing’ which never left her without a child in the cradle and
another at her breast. But she had too much to do at home to carry her energies
abroad; and district-visiting, mothers'-meetings, Bible-classes, and all the
other modern circumstances of parochial organization, were then things unknown.
Besides, there were no educated women to have ‘worked the parish,’ even if there
had been the thought or the endeavour. There was only one gentleman's family
besides our own; and as the squire's lady bore child for child with the
parson's, she was naturally as much tied at home.

Things were no more satisfactory in the church than they were in the parish. Not
more than twenty people came to the service, for the fullest attendance. The
average was about fourteen. On afternoons, when folks were late, the old clerk
would
page: 13 ring the bell for a short three
minutes, then shut the church door in a hurry—even if he saw some one coming in
at the lych gate—glad to be quit of his irksome duty for that day.

‘Nay, what, i' fegs, we bain't agoing to maunder through t' service for yon,’ he
said one day contemptuously to my father, when remonstrated with for shutting
the church door right in the face of Nanny Porter.

According to old Josh, souls counted by the gross; and the parson's own household
did not count at all; and it was a wicked waste of force to spend the means of
grace on a unit. So Nanny Porter had to go home again and leave her prayers
unsaid; and old Josh took the responsibility on his own soul, and swore a big
oath that hers would be none the worse for the lapse.

This morally unsatisfactory living was pecuniarily valuable. The rector was
Lord
page: 14 of the Manor as well as rector; and
heriots and fines on the death or displacement of tenants, together with tithes
in kind, rent-charges and compensations, raised the income to a good round sum
when all was told. There was always bad blood at tithing time, when the parson's
tenth ‘steuk’ was sure to be the largest of the row; the parson's tithe-pig the
fattest of the litter; while the geese, ducks, fowls, etc., driven into the
rectory back-yard for the service of the church and in payment of these despised
and neglected functions, were beyond compare the finest of their respective
broods.

When I grew old enough to understand how things were, I confess I felt both
ashamed and revolted when my father, as he sometimes did, went about the fields
himself, and chose his own tenth ‘steuks’ in the face of the world of reapers
and before the eyes of the farmer. They thought
page: 15
nothing of it; and as my father did his doubtful work naturally, cheerily and
genially, he lost no honour, but on the contrary gained in personal favour as a
‘good 'un of his kind,’ though his kind was bad enough. It was only my own
callow sense of personal dignity and democratic justice that suffered.

Our place used to overflow with produce at tithing-times. At Easter, eggs came in
by the hundred, and at ‘shearing-time’ wool was by the cartload. Everything else
was in like quantity. The tithers' supper made a supreme holiday for us young
ones. They always had hodgepodge, plum-pudding, and a glass of punch to follow;
and sometimes a cracked fiddle was put into requisition, when our maids used to
dance with the men, threesome reels or foursome, and jigs where the women held
their aprons (‘brats’ we called them) by the two corners, and flourished them,
thumbs
up-
upward
page: 16 ward, with clumsy coquetry as they
jigged. There was a grand quarrel between my father and his parishioners when
the Tithe Commutation Act came in force; and the seven years' average, which had
to be struck as the basis for the consolidated income, differed considerably in
the estimate of the one who was to be the recipient and the others who were to
be the paymasters. Things quieted down at last; and when Mr. Blamire's labours
came to an end, the new system was felt all round to be better than the old, as
giving less occasion for subterfuge here, suspicion there, and heartburnings on
both sides alike.

page: 17

CHAPTER II.

EDEN, the second living to which my father had been presented, just
before I was born, was by no means so rough and riotous a place as Braeghyll. It
was as drunken and immoral, but it was less ferocious and uncouth. There were
more resident gentry to keep civic order and restrain the lawless impulses
natural to strong-bodied and uneducated men. There was too, a tolerably fair
High School under the management of twelve ‘statesmen,’ which knocked the
rudiments of knowledge and some small sense of discipline into the
un-
unkempt
page: 18 kempt heads of the boys and girls who
attended or played truant at their parents' pleasure and their own will. There
was a great deal of honest moral courage and sturdy personal independence among
the people, mainly owing to the large number of these same ‘statesmen,’ or
peasant proprietors, who owned no master and were no man's hire. Some of them
had title-deeds dating from the time of Edward VI. and were both nominally and
substantially the ‘kings’ of their respective dales:—I say were, for now they
have almost disappeared as a class; not all to the gain of the country. But, as
I said, the drunkenness of the men and the lax virtue of the women kept about
even step in each parish alike; and though manners were less barbarous, morals
were no purer at Eden than at Braeghyll.

In those days a South-going coach ran twice a week through Eden; and the
page: 19 journey to London took three days and two
nights. A letter from London cost thirteen-pence halfpenny; and—as once happened
to ourselves, when we were told the contents of a brother's letter as it was
handed to us through the little window of the house in the square where the post
office stood—if of likely interest to the public, it was quickly read by our
sharp-tongued Mailsetter before delivery to those whom it concerned. As
envelopes had not then been invented, and the folded sides of the sheet were
always closely written over to get the whole worth of the postage, a little
practice in peeping made the process of deciphering easy enough; and the main
threads of all the correspondence afloat were in the hands of our Mailsetter
aforesaid. The franking system mitigated the severity of these postal expenses
to the rich. It was only the poor who suffered without any mitigation. They had
either to pay a formidable proportion of their week's slender
page: 20 earnings, or to go without hearing from the absent
ones at all. For it was a legal offence, carrying large penalties, to make the
carrier do duty as a postman and take, for twopence, what the Post-Office
charged sixpence or eightpence to deliver at the next town, some ten or twelve
miles away. People evaded the penalty by making the letter into a parcel and
tying it round with string well sealed; but, if discovered, the evasion did not
hold good, and the penalties were enforced as a warning to others.

All the carrying trade was done by these carriers, who were often men of shrewd
wit and keen observation, and who brought a breath of larger life into the small
places, as they passed through and told what they had seen and heard elsewhere.
A great part of the commerce too, of the time, was in the hands of pedlers, who
came at stated seasons to tempt the weak, profit by the savings of the thrifty,
and supplement
page: 21 the poverty of the mouldy little
shops where the shopkeeper was the tyrant and the customer was his slave. I
remember to this day the kind of Arabian Nights' splendour of gems and
jewellery, silks and shawls and ‘farlies’ of every description, which little
Pedroni, the Swiss-Italian who wore huge rings in his swarthy ears, used to
bring out of his cases with a certain mysterious reverence, as if each article
was worth a king's ransom. What a good fight my eldest sister made for that
green shawl with the kincob pattern!—and how I inwardly resolved to save up my
money when I should be a man, and become the proud possessor of that monstrous
silver watch, as big as a small warming-pan!

Beside our punctual pedlers with their packs, we had also our recognised
gaberlunzies—our established tramps of either sex. These also came in their
appointed seasons, and were hospitably entertained
page: 22 with a bed in the outhouse, a supper at the kitchen
door, and sixpence or a shilling at parting in the morning. My father always
added to his generosity a little homily, for the honour of the cloth and the
tradition of good things. Also we had our village idiots, who could do nothing
but sit in the sun and make mouths at those who passed; and our half-witted men
and women, who could scramble through a rough day's work of a purely mechanical
kind, were as happy as kings and queens with sixpence for their ‘darrack,’ and
who married, had children, and stuck peacocks' feathers in their ragged hats and
bonnets. We had our poachers and suspected smugglers—generally the handsomest,
strongest and swarthiest men of the district—who were looked on with profound
respect by us boys, and a deadly animosity by the gentry—which to us seemed
infinitely unjust. Why idealize and honour Will Watch if Black
page: 23 Jack Musgrave was a scamp? And we had our scares,
when the maids were hysterical and moony—scares which now meant burglars and now
‘bogles,’ and now again Burke and Hare, a report of whose sudden appearance in
the Lime-pots ran like wild-fire among us, and made the women afraid to venture
over the threshold, even so far as the stick-house, after dark.

Our church was a fine old Norman structure, choked with barbarisms. The frescoes
had been whitewashed over by successive generations of churchwardens; so had the
magnificent freestone pillars. The stained-glass windows had been taken away and
plain squares, among which were interspersed a few bulls' eyes, had been put in
their stead; the pews were the familiar old cattle-pens of every size and shape,
wherein the congregation sat in all directions and went to sleep in the corners
comfortably. The choir was composed of a few
page: 24
young men and women who practised among themselves as they liked and when they
liked, and sometimes essayed elaborate anthems which resulted in vocal
caricatures. The orchestra was a flageolet, on which the clerk, as the official
leader and bandmaster, gave the key-note; and at the feet of the choir, in the
dark at the west end, the High School boys and girls sat on benches which every
now and then they tipped up or overturned, played marbles, had free fights,
laughed aloud, and were dragged out by the hair, kicking and yelling, when their
conduct was too obstreperous for even the lax reverence of the rest to bear.
With all this we had a peal of bells which was the pride of the parish and
acknowledged to be the best in the county; and our bell-ringers were renowned as
past masters of their craft.

In my early youth, two families only among us kept a carriage or a footman;
page: 25 and no one thought of hiring a car, as our
tubs on wheels were called, for anything short of a day's excursion to the
neighbouring lakes and waterfalls. When evening parties were on hand—we never or
rarely gave dinners at Eden—the ladies tucked up their skirts and the men turned
up their trousers, and walked gaily through the snow in winter and the dust in
summer, lighted by lanthorns when there was no moon, and wearing wooden-soled
clogs shod with iron when the roads were ‘clarty.’ Picnics on the lake, where
each family contributed its quota, were the grand summer amusements of Eden; and
walking expeditions up the more practicable mountains, all returning to the
proposer's house for tea and supper and a dance or a round game in the evening,
took the place of modern tennis-parties. Without question, things were merrier
for us than our children have known how to make them for themselves.
page: 26 There was less luxury and more simplicity; people
were easily amused because not worn out by premature experience; and there was a
greater sense of homeliness and friendliness than can be found anywhere now.

Perhaps some among us went a little too far in the way of simplicity and
homeliness, as when the Roberts' girls—the daughters of the great literary light
who shone at Eden—took down the soiled house-linen to mend in the drawing-room
at Rydal Mount, where they were on a visit, to give Mrs. Hemans, who was also
there on a visit, a practical lesson on the value of good house-wifery and no
nonsense. Mrs. Hemans was somewhat superfine and lackadaisical; and these girls,
the youngest of whom was famous for a certain quiet hardness which amounted to
calm brutality, thought that to darn dirty linen before her eyes would be a
useful counterpoise to her Rosa Matilda proclivities. The result was that the
poetess
page: 27 fled from the room in dismay, and
ever after cherished the most profound horror for the uncompromising Marthas who
had so wounded her delicacy.

My father and that great literary light did not get on quite well together. I
have never understood why. There had been no quarrel that I know of; the
respective children were playfellows; and Dr. Roberts was as orthodox as my
father himself, and notoriously a dutiful son of the Church. But they were not
the friends one might have expected two cultured men would have been; and though
Dr. Roberts came regularly to church, as any other decent body might, when the
prayers were over he ostentatiously folded his arms, shut his eyes, and sat
during the sermon in a state of frigid indifferentism, like one no more
interested in the proceedings. He had done his duty to God and the Establishment
by saying his prayers and following the
ser-
service
page: 28 vice; to the sermon, which was purely
personal, he openly refused to give his attention.

At the other side of the vale, and not in our parish, was a very notable
family—incomparably the most liberal and enlightened of all we had. Thoughtful
and large-minded, they were remarkable, among other things, for the quiet
dignity of their lives; their inflexible sense of public duty; their orderly
management as proprietors and masters; their close friendships with the best
thinkers and foremost men of the time; and the determination with which they
discountenanced all local gossip and petty scandal. The father, and his son
after him, were men who make the unwritten but vital history of England, and
furnish the solid material of English greatness. The other son, however, belongs
to the written history of our time, and has left a name and done such work in
literature as will never die out.

page: 29

This family belonged, unfortunately for me, to the elder section of my
generation; so that I was not able to profit by them in the forming period of my
life, as I might have done had I been fifteen years or so older. It was only
when I was a grown man that I came to know and recognise the moral greatness
which was their inheritance. And then I was made. But to this day I have a
curious feeling of loyalty and clanship towards the survivors of the
house—especially towards one, the last of the elder generation, whose wonderful
charm can be as little described as the perfume of a flower or the melody of a
song. Indeed, she is very like a human flower or incorporate melody—and of all
emblems the Daisy and the Pearl suit her best.

Then there was a county magnate, whose house by the Bay where the water-lilies
grew, was a kind of sentimental Paradise to my elder brothers. Three beautiful
girls
page: 30 made the charm of those woods and
gardens; and three of my elder brothers fell in love, as was but natural; and
the tears shed in vain by these poor young erotic Tantaluses were matters of
family history for many years after. Besides these, were retired officers of
both services, who had come to Eden because the country was lovely and living
was cheap—with here a gentleman living on his estate, and there an outsider who
only rented and did not possess, and who never took quite the same place as the
autochthones by inheritance, or even the naturalized by purchase. We were also
in those days tremendously exclusive; and when the rich Leeds manufacturer
bought the estates of our historical attainted Lord, he was considered decidedly
below the salt, and there were anxious consultations among the impecunious
well-born as to the propriety of visiting him and his. I have lived to see all
this nonsense knocked out of
page: 31 the place; which
maybe has been converted to the compensating worship of wealth somewhat over
zealously.

Beyond these again, were the local oddities—the old maids with sharp tongues
renowned for queer sayings; the well-endowed widows with large hearts—‘mothers
in Israel,’ as they were called when the days of cant came upon us; the Will
Wimbles who played the flute were ‘characters’ and flighty, not to say more; the
hunting parsons who rode to hounds whenever they could, and when they could not,
did the best they could for themselves by riding into Eden, jack-booted and
spurred, to meet the coach and talk horseflesh with Tom and Arnold; the
scientific recluses who got a name of terror because of their anatomical
studies, whereby they were supposed to be too friendly with the Evil One; the
retired sea-captains, choleric and litigious; the Scotch doctors,
page: 32 drunken and clever, who performed wonderful
operations when half-seas over; the men-servants and maid-servants who were part
of the family and called by the master's name, as Birkett Tim and Crosthwaite
Molly; the maiden shopkeepers, who were the humbler members of the society,
greatly respected and esteemed, with whom the aristoi would sometimes take a cup
of tea and not hold themselves as condescending unduly:—these were as
individualized, and some were as queer, as anything to be found in Sterne or
Smollett. But the queerest of all were the incumbents of the small
chapelries-of-ease made off the mother-parish—all of whom were St. Bees men,
while many were as drunken as our old priest at Moss Moor, and none were men of
education and refinement. I remember how, at a visitation dinner at the
vicarage, one of these outlying pastors stood up in his place, and, asking the
Bishop familiarly if
page: 33 he would be served, carved
the cabbages before him with his own knife and fork. He had already eaten
generously with his knife. They all did in those days.

Our own way of living was simple in the extreme. Our servants wore short woollen
petticoats; cotton bedgowns and blue-checked aprons; huge caps with flapping
borders and flying strings; and thick-soled shoes, with which they wore out the
carpets and made a hideous clatter on the bare boards. We had a gardener who had
been a soldier, and who, in memory of his past glory, always wore a scarlet
waistcoat on Sundays; and we had a hay-field, a farmyard, and two cows—‘Cushie’
and ‘Hornie’—which in the summer evenings we used to go with the cook to bring
home from the field to the milking-byre. I think I could replace every dock and
ragwort and plot of nettles and mayweed in that ragged bit of pasture-land,
sloping down to the little
page: 34 brook where the
minnows were. Our food was oatmeal-porridge, night and morning. For dinner we
were allowed meat only twice a week. On the ‘banyan days’ we had large tureens
full of milky messes of exquisite savour, or enormous paste
puddings—‘roly-polys’—of fruit, jam, or undecorated suet. It was simple fare,
but it made a stalwart, vigorous set of boys and girls; and out of the whole
dozen, only two were relatively undersized and only one was delicate. The rest
averaged six feet for the men and the full medium height for the women.

My mother, who was of higher social standing than my father—for he was a simple
vicar and she was then the Dean's daughter—had married him against the consent
of her own people. She died when my eldest brother was fifteen years old and
when I, the youngest of the brood, was five months. Ten rapidly recurring
steps
page: 35 between these two limits filled the
quiver to overflowing.

My grandfather, at first violently angry, at last—when he had been made a
Bishop—proved his forgiveness of his daughter's disobedience and my father's
presumption by giving him, in succession, the best two livings in his gift; as
well as certain sinecures which the lax ecclesiastical conscience of those days
made it possible for an otherwise honest man to hold. But this liberality, added
to the original sin of the marriage, only served to alienate the rest of the
family more completely from us. For, as all my uncles were in orders, and all my
aunts had married clergymen, and plurality was then in force, and nepotism the
first duty of a patron-parent, it was but natural that they should resent this
apportionment of the big plums to the least desirable of the sons-in-law, rather
than to the more commendable who had the
page: 36 better
claim, or to the sons who had the most right.

This professional jealousy, backed by social disdain—for the family, as a family,
was one of the proudest, most exclusive, and most worldly in England—and my
father's total want of kindred on his own side, explain the isolation in which
we lived, and why, after my grandfather's death, we knew none of that kindly
superintendence which the children of a dead sister so often receive from those
still living. While my grandfather lived we were taken care of at the Castle;
but after his death we were abandoned; and my father was left to bring us up as
he would, unhelped and unchecked by the influence of his wife's kinsfolk. He
chose the rough and ready way of corporal punishment for all offences. He
believed in Solomon and the rod, and put religious conviction as well as
muscular energy into his stripes. It was a brutal
page: 37 system. But the times were brutal all through; and my father was neither
worse nor more enlightened than his generation. He sincerely believed that he
was doing his imperative duty when he thrashed us in accordance with the
inspired command; and that were the rod spared the child would be indeed spoilt.
And when a passionate temper takes with it divine sanction, the punishment it
inflicts is softened by no misgiving as to its wisdom or its humanity.

My stately grandfather himself set an example of almost incredible severity in
his family. His sons never called him anything but ‘Sir’ or ‘My Lord;’ and he
was never known to kiss one of his daughters, save by rare grace, or on supreme
occasions of marriage or departure, coldly on the forehead. Sometimes however,
he allowed them to kiss his hand. He gave his wife half-a-crown at a time for
pocket-money;
page: 38 and—like Mrs. Primrose, with
the guinea she ‘generously’ let each of her daughters have ‘to keep in their
pockets’—she was exhorted not to break into it nor spend it. It always went in
‘goodies’ for the grandchildren. When the sons were beneficed clergymen and
married men with children, they dared not have asked for a glass of wine at
their father's table; and he would have been a bold man who should have
addressed my Lord without first being spoken to.

A dark and terrible family tradition was whispered from each to each, under the
bond of absolute secrecy, how that once, when one of my aunts had reached the
ripe age of eighteen, my Lord Bishop had whipped her bodily with his own august
prelatic hands. He was a tall and dignified-looking man; famed for botany and
scholarship, and held to be the handsomest Bishop on the bench; but he was a
queer successor
page: 39 of the Fishermen; and I doubt
if the Master would have recognised him as a wholly satisfactory representative.
Yet it was told of him that once, in a rare fit of humility confessing some
trivial weakness of character, he said to my father with admirable condescension
to the frailty of a common humanity: ‘After all, Mr. Kirkland, a Bishop is only
a man!’

Naturally indolent and self-indulgent in his habits, but a man of the strictest
temperance—never once in his whole life, in that drinking age, having exceeded
the bounds of absolute sobriety; fond of shining in society, where he knew how
to make his mark, but almost impossible to drag out of his study for any form of
social intercourse; flattered by the notice of the great when it came to him,
but neglecting all his opportunities and too proud to accept patronage even when
offered; a Tory in politics and a Democrat in action; defying his diocesan
page: 40 and believing in his divine ordination;
contemptuous of the people as a political factor, but kind and familiar in
personal intercourse with the poor; clever, well read and somewhat vain of his
knowledge, but void of ambition and indifferent to the name in literature which
he might undoubtedly have won with a little industry; not liberal as a
home-provider, but largely and unostentatiously generous in the parish; fond
like a woman of his children when infants, but unable to reconcile himself to
the needs of their adolescence and refusing to recognise the rights of their
maturity; thinking it derogatory to his parental dignity to discuss any matter
whatsoever rationally with his sons, and believing in the awful power of a
father's curse, yet caressing in manner and playful in speech even when he was
an old man and we were no longer young; with a heart of gold and a temper of
fire—my father was a man of strangely
page: 41 complex
character, not to be dismissed in a couple of phrases.

With a nature tossed and traversed by passion, and a conscience that tortured him
when his besetting sin had conquered his better resolve once more, as so often
before, he was in some things like David;—for whose character he had the most
intimate kind of personal sympathy. ‘For I acknowledge my faults, and my sin is
ever before me,’ was the broken chord of his lament. But to us children, the
echo of his loud midnight prayers, waking us from our sleep and breaking the
solemn stillness of the night—the sound of his passionate weeping mingled in
sobbing unison with the moaning of the wind in the trees, or striking up in
sharp accord with the stinging of the hail against the windows—gave only an
awful kind of mystery to his character, making the deeper shadows we knew too
well all the
page: 42 more terrible by these lurid
lights of tragic piety.

My poor dear father! The loss of my beautiful mother, and, a year after her
death, that of the eldest girl, who seems to have been one of those sweet
mother-sisters sometimes found as the eldest of the family, had tried him almost
beyond his strength. His life henceforth was a mingled web of passion and
tears—now irritated and now despairing—with ever that pathetic prostration at
the foot of the Cross, where he sought to lay down his burden of sorrow and to
take up instead resignation to the will of God—where he sought the peace he
never found! He had lost the best out of his life, and he could not fill up the
gap with what remained.

There was one thing I have never understood:—why my father, so well read and even
learned in his own person, did not care to give his children the education
proper to
page: 43 their birth and his own standing. The
elders among us came off best, for the mother had had her hand on them, and the
Bishop too, had had his say; but the younger ones were lamentably neglected. I
do not know why. We were not poor. Certainly, we were a large tribe to provide
for and my father often made a ‘poor mouth;’ but his income was good, the cost
of living was relatively small, and things might have been better than they
were. At the worst, my father might have taught us himself. He was a good
classic and a sound historian; and though his mathematics did not go very deep,
they were better than our ignorance. But he was both too impatient and too
indolent to be able to teach, and I doubt if the experiment would have answered
had he tried it.

So time went on, and he allowed neither a responsible tutor for us boys nor a
capable governess for the girls, nor would he send
page: 44 us to school. He engaged, as a very perfunctory kind
of crammer for two of my brothers, the son of a small hamlet hand-weaver, a
young St. Bees man whose parents denied themselves almost necessaries that they
might give their son a good education and see him in the ministry. This young
man, who was both plain in person and ungainly in manners, fell in love with my
eldest sister, and inspired her thereby with a physical horror that became
almost a constitutional antipathy, such as certain people have for cats. When
she was quite an old woman she used to say she should feel if Mr. Donald came
into a room at her back, where she could not see him. She would feel him in a
shudder down her spine and goose-flesh over her skin.

When my father had engaged this young man, he thought he had done all for his
boys that was demanded of him by duty or need. If ever the subject was
broached
page: 45 to him, he used to lose his
temper, and always ended by saying that self-educated people got on the best. He
forgot the pithy saying that a self-taught man has had a dunce for his
master.

One of our family traditions, rounded off of course by repetition and the natural
desire to make a good story, tells how that, after our mother's death, my
grandfather sent for my father and urged him to do such and such things, whereby
he might increase his income and provide for the fitting conduct of his family.
To each proposal my father found insuperable objections. At last the Bishop,
losing patience, said angrily:

‘In the name of heaven, Mr. Kirkland, what do you mean to do for your
children?’

‘Sit in the study, my Lord, smoke my pipe, and commit them to the care of
Providence,’ was my father's calm reply.

page: 46

And he acted on his decision. He did emphatically commit us to the care of
Providence; and he was satisfied with his trustee.

Practically, this meant the control of the younger by the elder. The eldest
brother was the master of the boys, the eldest sister the mistress of the girls;
with intermediate gradations of relative supremacy according to seniority. Hence
there reigned among us the most disastrous system of tyranny, exercised by these
unfledged viceroys of Providence over their subordinates—a tyranny for which
there was no redress, however great the wrong. It was of no use to appeal to my
father. Had he sided with the complainant, things would have been worse in the
end, and there would then have been revenge and retaliation to add to the
original count. It was better to take things as they came, or to fight it out
for one's self. And there was always some one still younger
page: 47 to whom it could be passed on; which was so far a
comfort! Our house, in those days, was like nothing so much as a farm-yard full
of cockerels and pullets for ever spurring and pecking at one another. It was
the trial of strength that always goes on among growing creatures—especially
among young males; but it was bad to bear while it lasted. Add to this a still
more disastrous system of favouritism, and the knowledge that no justice was to
be expected, from my father downwards, if such a one were the plaintiff and such
another the defendant—and the breaking up among ourselves into pairs of sworn
friends and devoted allies—and this slight sketch of the moral rule that
obtained during the early days of my childhood is complete.

page: 48

CHAPTER III.

WE all suffered much from the want of intelligent supervision, but I, by
the inherent defects of my character, as well as by my place as youngest,
suffered most. Quick to resent and sensitive to kindness, rebellious and
affectionate, wilful and soft-hearted, I was ever in tumult and turmoil,
followed by disgrace, punishment and repentance. But I must say in
self-exculpation, that, tiresome as I must have been, I was as much sinned
against as sinning.

Easily provoked and daring in reprisals, but as the youngest the least
formidable
page: 49 and the most defenceless, I was
too good fun to be let alone. I was like the drunken helot told off to
self-degradation for the moral benefit of the young Spartans; for I was teased
and bullied till I became as furious as a small wild beast, and when by my
violence I had put myself in the wrong, I was held up as an example to Edwin and
Ellen to avoid, and flogged as the practical corollary. I do not suppose a week
passed without one of these miserable outbreaks, with the rod and that dark
closet under the stairs to follow.

These repeated floggings did me no good. Physically, they certainly hardened me
to pain, but morally they roused in me that false and fatal courage which breeds
the dare-devils of society and makes its criminals die game. But I was subdued
at once when anyone, by rare chance and gleam of common-sense, remonstrated with
me lovingly or talked to me rationally. I
page: 50 well
remember my ambition to prove myself worthy of his trust, which was like
sunlight in my tempestuous young life, when my father, instead of accusing and
threatening me, relied on my promise to do what was right and to my word when I
said I had not done what was wrong. Nor he, nor anyone who trusted to me, ever
found me even then a defaulter. Like a faithful dog, I would have stood to have
been hacked to pieces before I would have broken faith or forfeited my childish
honour.

These halcyon days of moral dignity were painfully exceptional; and my father's
confidence in me was that gift of God for which I longed more ardently than for
anything in my life before or since—and how seldom granted! I only remember two
occasions—once when I was believed about that broken drawing-room window, of
which I had not been the ball-playing cause; and once when I was allowed to
pick
page: 51 red currants for preserves, and my
father trusted to my promise not to eat nor filch. As things were, I was always
being guilty of some act of mischief, some flagrant disobedience to rules, or
some outburst of temper which gave those in authority reason when they thrashed
me, if they were in the wrong when they misunderstood me. So much I must say for
my past turbulent self:—I never remember being flogged for an act of meanness
nor for a lie; and I do remember twice taking his punishment for Edwin and not
betraying him. I never told tales of the others, and I was always ready to brave
danger and its consequences if asked to do a service. Thus, though I was
undeniably the black sheep of the flock, I was the one trusted to when a
steadfast agent was wanted.

At this moment there comes before me a little scene which must have taken place
when I was a very small boy.

page: 52

I was sent to steal some sacred apples for some of them—I forget who they were
now. As I shook the tree by means of a light garden-rake hitched up on the
branches, it fell and cut open my head, covering my neck-frill with blood. But I
gathered up the apples in my pinafore, and took them to my brothers or sisters
hiding behind the wall on the little bank which to this day is golden with the
‘shoes and stockings’ I remember so well; and then I marched sturdily into the
house, where Mary the nurse cut my hair, strapped up the wound, and put me to
bed. The next day I was taken to my father and flogged. But I would not tell for
whom I had stolen the apples, nor would I plead in mitigation of my punishment
that I had had none myself.

Our then ‘viceroy,’ the second brother—the eldest being away at college—was a
young fellow of eighteen, with a violent temper
page: 53
and a heavy hand. He was generous and affectionate at bottom, but he was
irritable, jealous and tyrannical to an overwhelming degree. One day, a
Punch-and-Judy show came on the lawn before the dining-room windows. We were all
there, watching the raree-show. I suppose I was excited and in one of my
impudent moods, for I persisted in calling my brother ‘Dicksy,’ a name he
disliked and specially forbade the smaller fry to use.

‘If you say that again I will thrash you,’ he said to me angrily.

I looked up into his face. How clear the whole thing is before me! The squeaking
and unintelligible Punch; the sunshine on the grass; the close throng, clustered
like flies against the window; and my sense of my brother's towering bigness and
formidible ferocity. But I was a daring young rascal, and always ready to brave
the unknown.

page: 54

‘Dicksy!’ I said defiantly.

Whereupon Richard was as good as his word, and then and there beat me
severely.

The brother who stood next to Richard, with one sister between, was three years
his junior. He was as tall, but naturally not then so strong; as passionate in
temper, but of a deeper nature and finer mental and moral quality altogether.
These two were natural foes and rivals, and were always fighting—the one
tyrannizing, the other rebelling. Before this day I do not remember this brother
Godfrey. He is lost in the crowd of the elders, from whom we little chaps were
separated as entirely as if they had been lions or we had been mice. After this
day he became one of the enduring loves of my life. I distinctly remember how he
turned upon Richard and fought him for his cruelty to such a little fellow as I
was—not quite five years old, and still in frocks like a baby; for I can yet see
the
page: 55 weals on my shoulder made by Richard's
vigorous fingers. After the scuffle Godfrey took me on his knee, and kissed me
to comfort me. From that moment there woke up in me a kind of worship for this
brother, just ten years my senior—a worship, which, old man as I am—still older
as he is—I retain to this hour. We have lived apart all our lives. In over forty
years I have seen him for two at a stretch. But when I realize the ideal of
knightly honour and manly nobleness—of that kind of proud incorruptibility which
knows no weakness for fear nor favour—I think of my brother Godfrey far beyond
the seas; he who as a boy braved his elder brother for the sake of a little
fellow who could not defend himself—as a man calmly faced an excited mob yelling
for their blood, to place under the shadow of the British flag two trembling
wretches who had only his courage between them and death.

The early life and adventures of this
page: 56 brother
are a romance in themselves. Had he lived in mythic times he would have been
another Amadis, a second Wallace. He is like some offshoot of heroic days,
rather than a man of a commercial generation; and in him the grand old Roman
spirit survives and is re-embodied.

Godfrey was my lord, but Edwin was my natural chum. Some eighteen months younger,
I was the stronger and bigger of the two. He had always been a delicate boy; and
the nursery tradition about him was that when he was born he was the exact
length of a pound of butter, was put into a quart-pot, and dressed in my eldest
sister's doll's clothes:—the ordinary baby-clothes were too large, and her doll
was a big one for those days. I was his slave and protector in one. He had none
of the emotional intensity, none of the fierceness of temper, the foolhardy
courage, the inborn defiance, neither had he the darkness of
page: 57 mood nor the volcanic kind of love which
characterized me. He was sweeter in temper; more sprightly as well as more
peaceful in disposition; more amenable to authority; of a lighter, gentler, more
manageable and more amiable nature altogether. He was the family favourite and
the family plaything. Long after my sisters had left off taking me into their
laps they would let Edwin sit on their knees for hours; and when my brothers
would have kissed a hedgehog as soon as me, they kissed him as they kissed Julia
and Rosamond and Ellen. He was never in mischief and never in the way. He cared
only to play quiet games in the garden when it was fair, or to sit in the
embrasure of the window when it was wet and we were forced to keep the house. In
consideration of his delicacy he had been taught wool-work and netting; and his
supreme pleasure was to sit on his ‘copy’ (a kind of stool), in a
page: 58 ‘cupboardy house’—that is, in the midst of a ring of
chairs forming a defence-work against intruders—while I told him stories ‘out of
my own head’ or Ellen good-naturedly read to him.

Besides this constitutional delicacy to make those in authority tender in their
dealing with him, he was the most beautiful of us all. Godfrey was incomparably
the handsomest of the grown boys—did not his beauty once save his life?—but
Edwin was the loveliest of the children. He was like one of Sir Joshua's
cherubs. His head was covered with bright golden curls, his skin was like a pale
monthly rose, and he had big soft blue eyes which no one could resist. Everyone
loved and petted him, as I have said. Our father, who saw in him the
reproduction of our dead mother, had even a more tender feeling for him than for
any of his other favourites; my own hero, Godfrey, loved him ten thousand
page: 59 times more than he loved me; and Richard, our
tyrannical ‘kingling,’ who spared no one else, spared Edwin. But no one
sacrificed to him as I did, and no one loved him with such fanatical devotion.
It was but natural, then, that he should lord it over me with that tremendous
force which weakness ever has over loving strength; and that I, the born rebel
but the passionate lover, should give to that weakness the submission which no
authority could wring from me. Also it came into the appointed order of things
that I should bore him by my devotion, and that he should pain me by his
indifference. It was a preface to the life that had to come—the first of the
many times when I should make shipwreck of my peace through love.

Yet had it not been for this devotion to Edwin, and the feeling that I was of use
to him for all his coldness to me, my life would have been even more painful
than it was.
page: 60 I was so isolated in the family,
so out of harmony with them all, and by my own faults of temperament such a
little Ishmaelite and outcast, that as much despair as can exist with childhood
overwhelmed and possessed me. Three years after his defence of me, when he was
eighteen and I eight, Godfrey left home; and I lost the Great-Heart of my loyal
love—the one I always felt was somehow my own special suzerain, if I were but a
despised kind of Dugald creature to him. But even at the best, the difference
between our ages prevented anything like friendship or companionship. He was my
lord, but he was never my familiar.

I remember how, after he had left, and though I knew that he was out of England
and countless miles away, I used to expect him to return suddenly and by
miracle; and how sometimes I used to look for him about the place—in the
cupboards and unused
page: 61 lofts. And I remember,
too, a strange horror that used to seize me, of expecting to find a pool of
blood in the place where I looked for him.

Perhaps this odd kind of horror was due to a terrible scene which had had a great
effect on me. Our two brothers, Richard and Godfrey, were shooting in a field
not far from the vicarage, and we were watching them from the windows. Suddenly
there was a tremendous report, a large volume of smoke, a cry and the hurrying
of men together; and then we saw a body carried on their shoulders, and brought
up to the vicarage. It was Richard, the barrel of whose gun had burst. The stock
had wounded him severely in the stomach, and covered him with blood. Godfrey was
safe, but singed. Perhaps it was some obscure association of ideas which added
this ghastly horror of expected blood to my grief for Godfrey's mysterious
flight and my insane
page: 62 belief in his miraculous
return—unable as I was, like all devotees, to accept the unalterable law when
dealing with love.

In these outcast days I used to dream a strange dream—strange, considering my
age—how that I was not one of them—not my father's child at all—but a foundling,
some day to be reclaimed and taken home by his own who would love and understand
him. I had a favourite hiding-place in the lime-trees at the foot of the garden,
where I used to lose my time, my strength and mental health in this fantastic
idea. Granting all the difficulties my family had to contend with in me, I do
not think the desolation of a young child could go beyond the secret hope of one
day finding himself an alien to his own—of some day being claimed by the
unknown—strangers coming out of space sure to be more gentle and sympathetic
than those others! But I always added, as a codicil to this testament
page: 63 of despair, that if ever I did find these unknown
dear ones, Godfrey should still be my king and Edwin my beloved, and that no new
tie should break these two golden links of the old sad heavy chain. As another
proof of my childish desolation, if also of my intemperate nature, I remember
how once, in a fit of mad passion for some slight put on me by my eldest sister,
whereat the others had laughed and jeered me, I first fought them all round,
then rushed off to a large draw-well we had in the coach-yard—we were not then
at Eden, but at my father's private house in Kent—intending to throw myself down
and end for ever a life which was at the moment intolerable and emphatically not
worth living. The heavy cover was over the mouth, and I could not move it. While
I was trying the gardener came along; and, seeing that I had been crying, he
good-naturedly took me to the apple-loft, where he filled my pockets with golden
russets—which
page: 64 consoled me grandly, and
lifted me over that little stile of sorrow into a flowery field of content. I
was then ten years old.

If Edwin had died when he was a child, the spiritualists would have had a case.
He woke one night sobbing piteously, and woke me, sleeping with him, by his
crying. When I asked him what was the matter, he said that he had just seen
‘poor mamma.’ He was on one side of a broad black river, and on the other, in a
garden full of flowers, stood our mother draped in white with wings like an
angel. She held out her arms and called: ‘Little Edwin, come to me! Little
Edwin, come!‘ Then he woke, and cried because he had again lost the mother whom
he, of all the children, most desired to have had and known. For not even those
who remembered her regretted her loss so much as did Edwin, who was not quite
two years old when she died, and who did not remember her at all. He had
page: 65 no illness after this, nor did he die. Thanks
to the pure blood we have all inherited, notwithstanding his early delicacy he
is alive and well to this day. But had he died then, this dream would have been
accounted a supernatural vision, and he would have been held to have been called
to death and paradise by his mother's spirit.

If all the failures in presentiments and warning dreams were recorded, I fancy
they would considerably outweigh the co-incidences.

I had not Edwin's pathetic yearning for our mother. I found her substitute in
Nurse Mary, whom I loved with overwhelming force, and got into trouble as the
result. As, once when she had been away for a week's holiday and had returned at
night, I was wakened up out of my sleep and taken to her bed. I was so glad to
see her that I cried; and finally cried myself into what was, I suppose, a fit
of hysterics;—
page: 66 when they whipped me as a useful
nervous counteraction.

This nurse was an undisciplined kind of woman, who now hugged us till she nearly
squeezed us to death, and now beat us black and blue. But I suppose my own
volcanic nature understood her violent one, for I could not live out of her
sight, and she was good enough to me. I am afraid she drank, poor Mary! Things
dark then are clear now; and those mysterious and sudden illnesses which she
used to have pretty often were, I fancy, due to brandy rather than to disease.
She left us when I was nine years old.

I was about eleven years of age when the first distinct stirrings of my mental
life began to make themselves felt. Godfrey's adventures—for he had returned
after two years' imprisonment in Russia—had something to do with the new light
that began to dawn in my young brain. I had
page: 67
always had a passion for books and pictures, and I knew almost by heart those
few that we possessed. In contrast to the wealth of modern days, it will not be
uninteresting to give the full catalogue of our special library. Mrs. Sherwood's
‘Little Henry and his Bearer’; ‘William and the Woodman’; ‘Sandford and Merton’;
‘Paul and Virginia’; ‘Evenings at Home’; ‘The Arabian Nights' Tales’; ‘Tales of
the Castle’; ‘Tales of the Genii’; ‘Robinson Crusoe’; ‘Pilgrim's Progress’—where
the occasion was generally improved for my benefit, as I was identified with
Passion, while Edwin was Patience; Miss Edgeworth's ‘Moral Tales’; and
‘Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia,’ formed our whole stock of profane
literature. For Sunday-reading we had ‘Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns’; the ‘Dairyman's
Daughter’; ‘Fox's Book of Martyrs’; ‘The History of all Religions’; ‘The Life of
Christ’—
page: 68 of which I remember only the
pathetic pictures of the Agony in the Garden and the Crucifixion, where two
little angels held up cups to catch the blood; and sometimes we were allowed to
look at the coloured plates of the ‘safe’ volumes of the ‘Encyclopædia
Londinensis’—the battle-horse of the study library. When we grew older we had to
read one of Sherlock's sermons—Sherlock was my father's favourite divine; or he
read to us in the evening, before prayers, a chapter out of Doddridge's ‘Family
Expositor,’ when all of us youngsters invariably fell asleep and were scolded
for our irreligious drowsiness.

But, as I say, when I was about eleven years of age, almost suddenly I seemed to
leap out of this narrow circle and to demand a larger mental area altogether.
There woke up in me the most burning desire to Know. With all the
page: 69 intense physical enjoyment of life given me by my
keen senses and strong animal nature—with all the delight I felt in putting out
my strength and learning how to increase and sharpen my growing bodily powers—I
had a dim consciousness that life meant more than mere pleasure; and that it was
as important to know history and geography, and what the problems of Euclid
proved, and what those unintelligible books in strange tongues said to those who
could read them, as it was to know how to swarm up a smooth-boled tree, jump
standing and leap running, and clamber like a goat over the crags and rocky
places. All these things were necessary and delightful; but higher and beyond
them all stood Knowledge.

By this time our family at home had decreased by death, marriage and absence, to
five—less than half the original number; and things educational were worse for
us,
page: 70 the youngest two boys, than they had
been for the elders. Edwin's health was too frail for school-life; and as he
could not go, neither could I. I was wanted at home to be his companion. It was
in vain that I begged my father to send me to school. He would not; and I vexed
him by my entreaties. Nor would he give us masters nor a tutor at home. He
promised, but he never fulfilled his promise. All the instruction I ever
received was of the pot-hook-and-hanger degree—the mere elements; the rest I did
for myself. And so years passed on, and still Edwin and I were kept at home to
do what we liked, provided we did not get into mischief and did not bother.

Part of that liking with me went into learning for myself what there was no one
to teach me. I took up languages; beginning with French. Year after year I
attacked one after the other, till I had got
page: 71
hold of a good many. But, as I learnt only to read and was not phenomenally
laborious, I scamped the grammar and devoted myself to translation—that is, I
neglected rules and learnt only words. This is the reason why, when I could read
with ease and translate aloud rapidly while I read, French, Italian, German,
Spanish, with a little Latin and less Greek, I could neither parse any of these
languages correctly nor speak one fluently. I learnt without method, and I have
never been able to disentangle my mind from the false order of the start.

This want of early training explains all my persistent intellectual
deficiencies—my want of dialectical skill, my want of scientific accuracy, and
how it is that I know nothing analytically, from the foundations upward, but
only synthetically, concretely, as it stands. This must needs be, seeing that I
have never built up any study brick by brick, nor chamber by chamber, but
page: 72 have only entered on the results of other
men's work—inhabiting where they have created. Essentially self-educated as I
am, that self-education began at an age when the elemental drudgery, which
always seems useless to ignorance, is naturally shirked for the more interesting
results. Learning, with me, was only a means to an end. For instance, I learnt
French out of curiosity to read an old illustrated ‘Telemachus’ that we had, and
thus to understand what the pictures meant; Italian to know about Petrarch and
Dante, whose conventional portraits in our encyclopædia had fascinated me;
German, for ‘Faust‘; Latin, to understand those brown-leather folios in the
study library; Spanish for ‘Don Quixote’; and Greek in the vain hope of
following Homer in the original—the awakening touch here having been given by
Godfrey telling me about the ‘far-darting Apollo’ and the ‘silver-ankled
Thetis.’
page: 73 And being by the nature of my
intellect quick to understand, and by temperament impatient to possess—‘a
temperament founded on ultimates,’ as my friend Garth Wilkinson said of me in
later times—I had not mastered the rudiments when I plunged into the middle
term, and bounded on to the end. Thus, never subjected to that severe mental
discipline which is but another form of moral control, I grew up in absolute
mental unrestraint; and I have never been able to put myself into harness
since.

This independence of thought is not presumption nor vanity, nor any of the hard
things believers in authority say of the self-reliant. It is the result of
antecedent conditions, for which a man is no more responsible than he is for the
size of his skeleton. And he can change the one as little as the other. Those
who are to be disciplined must be taught their drill and
page: 74 made to obey; and no one can be at once self-reliant
and submissive.

This then, was how things stood in my early boyhood, after the stage of childhood
proper was passed—say from between eleven to seventeen. In my mental life,
undirected and unhelped, save by opposition—which has always been a powerful
stimulus to me—I strove to learn, to know, to possess. So far I was justified by
my conscience and at peace with myself; and if I lost my time, took things by
the wrong end, and amassed a world of rubbish which did me no good then nor
since, I did not know my mistakes, and my ignorance was my bliss.

In my family I was still under the old cloud. I was snubbed by my father, whom I
constantly worried and often angered; roughly handled by my brothers, whose
authority I defied when they came home for their vacations from college; sent to
Coventry by my sisters whom I
page: 75 revolted by my
violence and affronted by my impertinence; made his slave by Edwin, who did not
really love me in those days; but with all this I knew that I tried to do right,
however poorly I succeeded, and that I would have died rather than I would have
done what seemed to me mean or false, or cowardly or selfish. And ever and ever
I longed with a hungry passion that ran into pain, for the love which my own
turbulence of nature made it impossible for others to give me.

If our dear mother had lived, things would have been different. She would have
understood each and would have done justly by all. Under her wise management
there would have been none of that neglect in direction and harshness of
punishment when things went wrong which had been the rule of our upbringing. And
her gentle influence would have tamed the tempers and regulated the actions of
all alike. All our
page: 76 troubles were due to her
death; and my poor father was as much to be pitied as were we.

I have dwelt so long on the early life of my childhood because it gives the clue
to all the rest. The boy is father to the man, and the first chord contains the
key-note of the whole succeeding harmony.

page: 77

CHAPTER IV.

AT seventeen my future profession was undetermined and my real education
had never been begun. My father's constitutional indolence had greatly increased
of late years, and nothing was so difficult to him as to take a resolution,
excepting to act on it when taken. Hence, Edwin and I were still hanging about
at home, doing nothing that should in any way equip us for the life in which we
had to take our place and pull our pound with the rest.

Though we two were incomparably the worst off for tuition, our elder brothers
page: 78 themselves had been but slenderly furnished,
all things considered. Therefore they had failed to make for themselves such
positions as might have helped us youngsters against the dead weight of my
father's inertia. It was as much as they could do to fend for themselves and
struggle into comparatively good places. And some of them, in revolt against
their difficulties, had flung up the attempt here at home, and had cast their
lines in the dark but brisker waters of emigration and exile.

There never was a family with so much power left to run so cruelly to waste for
want of timely cultivation as was ours! It is no vanity to say that we were an
exceptionally fine set all through, and that, had we been properly trained, each
one of us would have made his mark. There was not a dunce among us, nor a
physical failure. All my sisters were pretty; all my brothers were well-grown
and handsome; and Edwin,
page: 79 who was the least
robust in person, was the most beautiful in face and the most lovely in
character. I have often lamented the waste of good material in our family, and
the loss to the world that it has been. When I see the elaborate education given
to boys and girls with brain-power of the most ordinary calibre, and note what
careful training has made of them, and then remember the large amount of mental
and physical vitality among ourselves, and what ordinary care might have made of
us, I confess I feel heartsick—foolish as it is to look back, like Lot's wife,
over the irrecoverable past. All the same, it was a misfortune; and it has been
a real loss.

It might have been so different! My father's office and position made him an
influential person in society; my mother's family kept us abreast with the
county magnates, at least in theory, if, owing to my father's disinclination to
society, scarcely in
page: 80 practice; and we had
friends who might have helped us if they would. There was, for one, the great
Tory member whose historic name was like a battle-cry—he had power enough, if he
would have used it for gratitude without being entreated. For my father would
have cut off his right hand before he would have asked a favour of living man.
When an election was on hand, and every vote was of consequence, Sir James used
to come to our house, make much of his dear friend Mr. Kirkland, praise his
Latinity and his poetry, admire the girls, kiss the children, and hint at
substantial services for the boys. When he was returned he forgot all about his
dear friend as cleanly as if he had never existed, and did not lift a finger to
serve the sons of his faithful partisan, who were also the grandsons of his old
master, the Bishop. His want of gratitude never touched my father's political
fidelity; for no man was
page: 81 ever less a
self-seeker than he. He did his duty at a personal loss quite as stoutly as if
it brought him grist and grain; though he suffered from ingratitude, as any man
of sensibility would. But he never complained, even in the privacy of home. I
have never known anyone more entirely free from all spite and bitterness than
he.

By this time I had formed my theory of the universe. What thoughtful boy of
seventeen has not? I was firmly convinced that I held the fee-simple of all
great truths in my hands, and that no views other than those which seemed to me
right were worth consideration. All were the outcome of either ignorance or
falsehood—of either blind superstition which could not see the light, or wilful
tyranny, conscious of its iniquity but determined to hold on for the oppression
of truth. No question could have two sides; no opponent could be an honest man;
no ultimate development
page: 82 of my own theories
could eventuate in evil. Does not every individual, like concrete society, go
through this phase of bigotry—tyrannous and unjust by its very intensity of
conviction?

I was comically proud of being an Englishman. I had no doubt that we were God's
modern chosen—His eldest sons and peculiar favourites; that the English
Protestant Church was the very Delos of Truth—the ark of the Christian covenant;
that even Christian prayers said in a foreign tongue were not heard with so much
pleasure, nor answered with so much precision, as ours—while prayers said to a
Being who did not exist—to Allah or Brahma, Vishnu or Buddha, not to speak of
the Madonna and the saints—were neither heard nor answered at all; that we were
the best gentlemen, the bravest men, the most enlightened and most virtuous
people on the face of the earth; and that every departure from our special
page: 83 ways of living and thinking was a wandering
into the desert with destruction at the far end. That is, I was bounded by my
own circumstances, and could not travel beyond my experience.

Also, I was an ardent Republican and a devout Christian. Indeed, I was the one
because the other; and, in spite of that injunction to pay tribute to Cæsar, on
which my father so much insisted, I could not see a ‘via media.’ Nor could I
understand the compromise between faith and practice, consistency and
expediency, made by the believing world; nor yet how men, who would have roasted
alive an infidel had the law permitted, could deliberately break all the
commands given by the Saviour. That fine satirical problem of how to hold
together, on the principles of the Sermon on the Mount, an empire founded on the
breach of all the Ten Commandments, had not then been formulated. But the spirit
of it was
page: 84 in my own young head, and the
difficulty involved was one that puzzled me as it has many more than myself, and
will continue to puzzle others for some time yet to come.

For my own part, full of youthful zeal and the logic of consistency, I determined
to live the Christian life so far as it was possible; helped thereto by the
influence and example of the strong old heathen times. I, at least, in my own
person would be faithful to the Lord and a man among men.

I began by renouncing all the pleasant softnesses and flattering vanities of my
youth, and made myself a moral hybrid, half ascetic, half stoic. I accustomed
myself to privations and held luxuries as deadly sins. Sensual by nature, I cut
myself off from all sweets of which I was inordinately fond; and because I was a
heavy sleeper and fond of that warm
ener-
enervating
page: 85 vating morning doze which made me
always late for breakfast, for a whole year I lay on the floor and despised bed
as an unrighteous effeminacy. Never cowardly to pain, I taught myself to bear
mild torture without wincing—as, when I one day dug out a tooth with my knife as
a good exercise of fortitude. Because I once saw myself in the glass with a
strange and sudden consciousness of the beauty of my youth and personality, I
turned that offending bit of blistered quicksilver to the wall, and for six
months never saw my face again. During that time I had to undergo many things
from my sisters because of the untidiness of my general appearance; for though I
had become scrupulously clean by now, as part of the physical enjoyment of
life—clean even to my long brown freckled hands, surely the test-piece of a
boy!—I was but a sloven in the decorative part, and never knew the right side
from the wrong, and scarcely the
page: 86 back of things
from the front. I gave away all the ‘treasures’ I had accumulated since my
childhood, in imitation of the Apostles and according to Christ's injunctions to
the rich young man; and no one but myself knew of that little altar which I had
built up in the waste-place behind the shrubbery, where I used to carry the
first of such fruit as I specially liked, to lay it thereon as my offering to
God—to wither in the sun or be devoured by insects and birds. I set myself
secret penance for secret sins. I prayed often and fervently, and sometimes
seemed to be borne away from the things of time and space and carried into the
very presence of God, as it were in a trance—a still living Gerontius. I
realized my faith as positively as if it had been a thing I could see and touch.
My confirmation was a consecration; and when first I received the communion, I
felt as if I had tabernacled the Lord in my own
page: 87
body, and that I was henceforth His, so that I could never sin again.

In these days of boyish fervour, had I fallen into the hands of a Roman Catholic
I should have become a monk of some severe disciplinary order. My whole inner
life was one of intense religious realization. God was far off, the paternal
King and inexorable Judge of all, and His ‘unlidded eye’ ever watched me with
awful attention. This thought was sometimes so oppressive that I used to shrink
and cower under the consciousness of being always looked at; when I would cover
my face in my hands and say aloud:

‘Oh! if I could but be sometimes alone—if I could but hide myself and be able to
think as I liked and not be watched nor heard!’

And then I felt that I had spoken blasphemy and committed the unpardonable
sin.

page: 88

My consciousness of Christ was softer. He was my gracious Prince, to obey whom
brought the joy of loyal serving. To disobey pained rather than angered Him, and
caused Him that ‘crucifixion afresh’ in which I believed as firmly as I believed
in Gethsemane and Golgotha. The angels were my invisible companions, of whom I
was not afraid; and I felt the grim presence of the devil at my back and in the
corners of the room, as one feels the presence of a murderer in the dark. In a
word, I lived in the Christian's sanctified egotism—believing that all the
forces of heaven and hell were mainly occupied with the salvation or destruction
of my one poor miserable little soul; and that the most important thing between
earth and sky was, whether a hot-blooded lad with more sincerity than judgment
flew into a rage when he should have curbed his temper, or heroically checked
his impulses of sensuality in the
page: 89 matter of
jam-pudding and the fruit garden.

But during all this time of my faithful endeavours after a higher life I was just
as intolerable to my family as before, and my passions were still my masters. My
anger blazed out in the old fierce way at the smallest provocation; and when the
blood mounted to my head, then I was again the helot self-degraded I had always
been. Heaven was shut against me, and I was spiritually in the Hell I was
predestined to eternally inhabit.

I was vehemently penitent when the fit was over, and resolved in my wild way of
repentance to bear with Christian patience the next affront put on my sensitive
pride. Alas! nature was too strong for me, and my progress in self-control was
like nothing so much as the twirling of a squirrel in his cage. For all my
efforts to deliver myself, I was up to my neck in the Slough; and my prayers
brought
page: 90 me no more spiritual grace, no more
godly fruitage, than so much water poured out on sand. The boiling blood I
called on God to calm boiled ever as madly as before; and with all my faith in
the Divine presence and power, I was conscious that I was not answered.

What agony I went through! What an infinite sense of being fated to sin,
foredoomed to perdition, possessed me, as I felt that I was left to fight with
my wild beasts unhelped—to struggle to get free, that I might take refuge in
God, and to be hopelessly in the clutch of the devil! It was as if some monster
held me bodily, while I was striving to deliver myself that I might rush into
the outstretched, loving arms of the Saviour opposite. But that Saviour waited
for me to go to Him. He did not and would not help me. Only those who have gone
through a like period of spiritual endeavour and frustration can realize my
page: 91 sufferings at this time, which, I remember,
threw an awful kind of light on the myths setting forth the endless labour of
Sisyphus and the fruitless work of the Danaïdes in hell.

Clergyman though he was, all this ebullient zeal and youthful extravagance of
aspiration annoyed my father as if the translation of faith into practice had
been an impiety, and not an effort after godliness. We will grant the clumsiness
of the method—still, the effort was always there. Logical Christianity seemed to
him a dream as fanatical as it was inconvenient. All that was necessary for our
salvation was—to believe the Bible, obey our parents, say our prayers night and
morning, go to church regularly, and keep ourselves free from forbidden sins.
More than this was to fall on the other side and go over into presumption.

He venerated the saints and martyrs of
page: 92 past
times; but he maintained that the past was not the present, and that the age of
enthusiasm, like that of miracles, had died out. Had persecution been revived,
he would have stood firm for his own part, and he would have exhorted others to
a like fidelity. But as no more fires in Smithfield would be lighted, at least
in our generation, and no one would now call out: ‘Christianos ad leones!’ he
held spiritual assent more valuable than practical imitation, and quiet walking
in the cleanly parts of the broad highway better than scaling eccentric heights
and shouting ‘Excelsior!‘ from the clouds.

It was useless for me to turn to him for guidance. He repulsed me with coldness,
or testily chid me with arrogance, when I carried my difficulties between faith
and practice to him. He accused me of presumption in thus questioning the lives
of men older, better, wiser than myself—such
page: 93 a
mere unformed lad as I was! And ever, with perfect justice and uncompromising
logic, he pointed out the inconsistency of my aspirations after superior piety
with my acted life of passion and misconduct. My conscience told me he was right
when he thus flung me back with the argument ‘ad rem.’ What had I to do with
good or godliness—I, the child of sin, whose very love was a tempest, whose
quarrels were volcanic eruptions, whose repentance was a tropical storm, and
whose virtues themselves were as unsettling and disturbing as were his faults?
If I could just scrape in by conformity, that was all I need hope for. To
attempt more was as irrational as if a lame man who could not walk should try to
leap.

The wave of religious revivalism, just beginning to break on the arid shores of
ecclesiastical indifference, was to my father a sign of storm and shipwreck, not
of healthy
page: 94 movement. He stood apart from both
Evangelical enthusiasm and Tractarian authority with equal dislike for each.
Through the former, moreover, he had received personal annoyance of a grave
kind. During his five years' absence in Kent, his curate, one Mr. Black, had
‘awakened’ and ‘converted’ the parish of Eden to a high pitch of evangelical
fervour. A schism in the place was the natural consequence. The Evangelicals
said that my father had not been a faithful minister of the Word, and that the
Gospel had never been preached to them before the advent of Mr. Black; and the
sleepy old souls, who disliked innovations, stood by their kind-hearted vicar
who did so much quiet good in the place, though he did not ‘pan out’ on free
will and prevenient grace, baptismal regeneration and faith before works. They
scouted the new order as fantastic and extreme; and thought evening parties,
where prayers took the
page: 95 place of the former
round games, and expounding recondite doctrines that of the old forfeits, not
only monstrously dull but also unseemly.

Their sheet-anchor was Conservatism and keeping things as they were. What had
done for their fathers was good enough for them, and ought to be good enough for
their children. No improvements, however much they were needed, met with their
support. They saw no good in the Sunday-schools, which had been built and were
kept up by a rich adherent of the energetic curate; and the ‘restoration’ of the
old church by the same generous hand was an offence to them. Munificence had a
hard fight with chronic obstructiveness before it got leave to bestow; and every
stone that was laid and every ornament that was added was subjected to hostile
criticism and opposition.

Naturally my father was not so backward as this. He recognised the good and
beauty
page: 96 of all these changes. The restored
church was really magnificent; and the fine organ, with its organist and
well-trained choir, was a decided advance on old Adam and his pitch-pipe. The
Sunday-school teachers too, kept those unruly children in order; while the low
pews, all looking one way, held the congregation together and prevented the
sleepy-heads from snoring. But the finer surroundings demanded a more stately
method; and in his heart my dear, indolent father, when he came back into
residence, regretted the old familiar ways, and felt strange in all this new
niceness, where he had to be for ever on parade and always alert and in order.
If the glory of God could have been fitly set forth without so much ado, it
would have been more pleasing to him. He thought it just a little in excess—as
he thought my poor, purblind efforts very greatly in excess.

My father and I, not in harmony on
reli-
religious
page: 97 gious matters, were at issue in
politics—High Tory, according to his age and training, as he was; Republican of
the crudest academic type as was I. We had many a stormy scene; for I was such
an impulsive fool I could never hold my peace, and when my mind teemed with
thoughts that knocked at the door of my lips, they had to come forth, for good
or ill.

‘I would rather see the devil himself let loose on the earth than the Radicals
get the upper hand in the country!’ my father said to me one day in a paroxysm
of rage, when I had rashly introduced the subject of the first Chartist
petition, just then presented to Parliament.

‘And I hold all kings and tyrants as direct emissaries of the devil, and that
“Vox populi, vox Dei,”’ was my defiant reply.

For which piece of impertinence my father called me a puppy and incontinently
knocked me down.

page: 98

In those days O'Connell was my political idol; and I seriously thought of running
away from home to offer myself to him as the servant and soldier of liberty,
good for any work he might give me to do. Had not Godfrey, that best and noblest
of us all, gone to join the Poles in their rise against Russia? and was not the
freedom of a country beyond one's own small nationality? Wherefore, for all my
patriotism, I rather inconsistently longed for the Irish to take up arms, that I
might imitate my brother's splendid example and fight their
tyrants—ourselves—for their liberties. I thought Byron's ‘Irish Avatar’ the
finest bit of poetry the world had ever seen—run hard, however, by Campbell's
‘Song of the Greeks;’ and I used to declaim these two poems with a ferocious
energy which made my sister Ellen call me, in her quiet way, ‘a perfect
monster’—while Edwin added: ‘You are just a maniac, Chris, and ought to be put
into a madhouse.’

page: 99

If I found in O'Connell my Leonidas, my Brutus, my Tell—any one you like who
shall best express the anax andrōn of history and liberty—Sheil was my
Demosthenes; and I used to devour his speeches as if they had been the text of a
new Gospel. In the smaller men, of whom our own Liberal county member was the
natural chief, I saw the modern representatives of the immortal Three Hundred.
The French Revolution was the divine birthday of European liberty—I am not far
from the same belief now! Lafayette, thin and respectable mediocrity that he
was, took, in my ardent imagination, heroic proportions and colossal merits; and
I undutifully rejoiced over the discomfiture of my country in the American War
of Independence. I believed in Greece and abjured Turkey. I adored Poland and I
hated Russia. Joan of Arc, the Maid of Saragossa and Charlotte Corday, were my
feminine ideals; but the old Judaic heroines,
page: 100
such as Judith and Jael, were even then abhorrent, and I marvelled much how God
could have found them worthy.

I envied the dead of all times and in all places who had known how to die for
Liberty; and I held the apotheosis of humanity to have been reached in Old
Greece and Republican Rome. I burned as with fever when I read of old-time
tyrannies, and shouted to the skies when they were avenged;—for the past was as
the present to me, and my vivid imagination bridged the gap with the living
lines of sympathy. I raged dumbly, or broke out into stormy deprecation when my
father, as he often did, read aloud the most pungent bits of the ‘Anti-Jacobin’
and I held Canning as no better than Judas Iscariot. All of which means that I
was as intolerant as the men whose intolerance I reviled—as arbitrary as the
tyrants who had oppressed free thought and slaughtered independent action.

page: 101

And I tried to indoctrinate Edwin with all this burning hatred of oppression, all
this admiration for the assassins of tyrants, all this sympathy with revolt
which filled me as with a divine afflatus. But when my proselytism was more
noisy and aggressive than usual, he simply shook his fair curly head with his
favourite little action of disdain, and told me that I was an ass for my
pains—for we were a plain-spoken lot, and did not mince our terms among
ourselves. And when I bothered him too much he lost his patience and got
annoyed, telling me that I was the most unendurable nuisance and the biggest
idiot going, and that if I did not hold my tongue he would leave the room. Then
I stormed at his civic and political indifferentism, which to me was a real
crime; and probably tore out of doors to work off my anger and cherish may sense
of isolation by long lonely rambles among the mountains, where
page: 102 I felt like some exile banished for the sake of
liberty—friendless among men, but supported by the immortal justice of his
cause.

It was towards the beginning of this political phase in the ‘Sturm und Drang’
period of my life that the Chartist riots were on hand. With what vague dread
and sympathy combined they filled me! I was quite sure that their cause was holy
and that their demands were just; but the thought of danger, when brought home
to my own people, froze the blood in my veins with horror. I might shout ‘The
Song of the Greeks’ to wind and sky for as long as I liked, but I had no fancy
for seeing the beaks of our home ravens crimsoned with the precious blood of
friends and family! Still, if there were to be a general revolution, I used to
assure Edwin, I would protect them all. Of course I should join the insurgents;
but, if the worst came to the
page: 103 worst, my
Brothers the Chartists for my sake would hold harmless all I loved. And they
would place an armed guard at our gate, who would require the password from all
who came near, and allow no one to enter with evil intent. And we would receive
into the rectory all our best friends, and I would be their saviour. For myself,
if the royalists won, I would not take my life at their hands at a gift.

I do not think my assurance had a very tranquillizing effect on my brother or my
sisters, who somehow, with the illogicality of youth, made me responsible for
their terror. How young it all was!

I shall never forget my strange emotion when, one day, we heard the guns over by
Carlisle—we were then at Braeghyll, which was at the back of the mountains. We
were walking on the high moor which runs into the plain where Carlisle stands.
My father said it was the Chartists firing at and
page: 104 being fired on by the soldiers; and he looked grave
and anxious, and did not abuse the poor fellows. His kind heart carried it over
his political passions, and he was sorry for the men who would have to suffer.
And how vividly I too realized the fact of war being within this measurable
distance of our home; but oh! how my blood leapt for hope that the cause of
Liberty would prevail! But I dared not speak. When my father was in such a mood
as to-day, I was awed by loving reverence into silence.

About this time a party of about thirty men one day surged in at the rectory
gates, and came up to the house, demanding bread and money. My father chanced to
be from home this day; which was as well; for the men were at first inclined to
be blustering and rude, and my father's quick temper ‘flew’ at insolence as
quickly as the seed-vessel of the balsam flies at the touch. He
page: 105 would have been kind enough to them had they been
respectful; but he would have braved all consequences had they been brutal. The
sight of my pretty sisters, however, and of us two young boys, soon soothed them
into a pleasant frame of mind; and when I went out boldly among them, and
fraternized with them, joining with them in their general abuse of all
aristocrats and mill-owners, and talking seditious nonsense with the best, they
grew quite friendly and confidential. One of them justified my former boasts by
assuring me, with an oath, that when their day came we should have no cause to
be ‘afeard.’ The rectory should be marked with white chalk, and not a hair of
our heads should be harmed.

So the adventure passed off without more
page: 106 damage
than that which came from a temporary domestic famine. For the men generously
refused to take any money from such a young, irresponsible set as we were: ‘Nay,
we isn't rogues!’ they said; and after their bread and cheese and beer, they
left us with a ringing shout, and ‘God bless the parson's childer!’ flung back
as their parting words, when they passed through the gate.

Another time we got into an excited crowd as we were driving back from Carlisle.
There had been a mass-meeting of the mill-hands there, and they took my brother
Godfrey for Feargus O'Connor. They swarmed over the carriage in noisy and rather
inconvenient enthusiasm, insisting on shaking hands with us all; till Godfrey
grew angry with their familiarity to our sisters, and, knocking one drunken
fellow down, drove off at a smart pace. His ideas of fraternity did not include
grimy paws thrust into Ellen's pretty hands; and half-drunken
oper-
operatives
page: 107 atives claiming us all as their
‘mates’ was bringing the ideal down to the vulgar real with a run—making of
Bellerophon carrying Theseus a cart-horse driven by a satyr.

page: 108

CHAPTER V.

HOW bitter-sweet life was to me in this forming-time of my character!
and how violent the contrast between my mental troubles and the keenness of my
physical enjoyments! No one who drew in the sweet breath of flowers or stood
against the storm-winds, glad in his youth and rejoicing in his strength,
enjoyed the great gift of Life more than I. And no one suffered more. My
recollection of all my young life is that of a tempest. I never knew rest, never
compassed the outermost circle of serenity. I was always either violently elated
or as
vio-
violently
page: 109 lently miserable—always one with the
gods or down among the demons who people hell. But, full of unrest and turmoil
as was the present, how resolved I was that the brilliancy of the future should
repay me with more than compound interest! Once give me my liberty, my majority,
and my share of the small fortune left us by our grandfather, and let me go into
the world for myself, and I would be happy. I always said to
myself: ‘I will not be like other men, miserable and discontented, because
failures and weak-kneed. When I am my own master I will be happy, because I will
conquer fate and compel fortune; and I will then make friends who will love and
understand me.’

For I would be famous and do great things. I would cover my name with glory, and
all those who had not believed in me with confusion; and my own should be proud
of me. I used to dream of the senior wranglership at Cambridge and of the
page: 110 leadership of the House of Commons. I would
go to the bar and be Lord Chancellor, or remain a free lance and be Prime
Minister. I would make a name; I would be great. Whatever I did I would succeed.
And I felt as if I could not fail.

I also felt as if I could not die—as if there were no forces in nature which
could destroy that strong vitality, that passionate outstretch and possession by
which I knew how the gods of old were framed and fashioned. Belief in
immortality is the correlative of strength and youth. It is only when we are old
and tired that eternal rest seems possible and unbroken sleep desirable.

At one time I had been undecided whether I would be an artist or an author. I was
intensely fond of painting, and ‘Anch'io son pittore’ was a phrase that had rung
in my ears like the sound of a golden bell. It struck a chord which has vibrated
ever since in the pride and joy I take in my profession,
page: 111 and I well remember, the first time I walked to the —
office with my first commanded leader in my pocket, I said to myself aloud:
‘Anch'io son pittore! I also am one of the leaders of public opinion and the
makers of modern thought.’ But I was very short-sighted; and when I thoroughly
realized the disadvantages of this defect, I gave up the idea of being a second
Raffaele and stuck to that of over-topping Gibbon or Scott instead.

Many things helped on this final decision. I had always had the power of ‘telling
stories out of my own head,’ and I could imagine things so vividly, I was not
always sure whether I had seen or only fancied that I had seen them. Fired by
the thrilling adventures of my beloved Godfrey, who had returned from Russia and
imprisonment when I was about ten years old, I had already begun a novel to be
called ‘Edith of Poland’—the idea of which had come into
page: 112 my mind during a dull sermon at our parish church of
Shorne, when we were in Kent. And was not that a sign by which to steer? A book
published by the Christian Knowledge Society, and I think called ‘Difficulties
of Genius,’ had greatly influenced my mind. It had given stability to my hopes,
and, as it were, a practicable backbone to my ambition, by the example of others
who, as untaught as I, had yet by their own industry and resolve risen to be the
shining lights of their generation. Thus directed and encouraged, after long
wandering round the outer circle of possibilities, I finally gravitated to the
centre, and chose the profession of literature as more within the range of my
powers than any form of plastic or pictorial art. And as the most useful
preparatory tools were languages, I had devoted myself to the study of tongues,
with this graver end more or less consciously underlying the pure delight I felt
in the
page: 113 mere acquirement of words and the
ability to read what else would have been so many sealed books.

It was about this time that a curious bit of hallucination came to me. It was All
Halloween, and we of the North still believed in spells and charms. My sisters,
Edwin and I were melting lead, roasting nuts and wasting eggs—whereby the white
drawn up by the heat of the hand through water might determine our future—when I
was dared to that supreme trial:—to go upstairs into my bedroom, lock the door,
and, with the candle set on the dressing-table, deliberately pare and eat an
apple, looking at myself in the glass all the while. I would in those days have
accepted any challenge offered me—to go into a lion's den, if need be:—this bit
of fantastical bravery was easy enough! Jauntily and defiantly I bounded up the
stairs, locked the door, pared and began to eat my apple, with my eyes fixed
page: 114 on the glass. And there, suddenly out of the
semi-darkness—the eyes looking into mine—peered a face from over my shoulder;—a
dark, mocking, sinister face which I could draw now as I saw it then—how many
years ago! Broad in the low, flat brow, with dark hair waved above the arched
eyebrows—the eyes deep-set, dark, and piercing—the nose long and pointed—the
thin mouth curled into a sneer—the chin narrow, but the jaw wide—it was all so
vivid that I turned sharply round, saying: ‘Who is there?’

No one was there, of course; and I spoke into a void more gruesome than that grim
Presence would have been.

The vision did not return, and I ate my apple to the last pip steadily; but when
I went downstairs they all laughed and said I was as white as if I had seen a
ghost; and they were sure I had; and what was it like?

page: 115

‘The devil,’ I said gruffly; on which Ellen said mildly:

‘Upon my word, Chris, you are more like a bear than a boy.’

Long after this I had in my ears the sound of rushing wings. They were so loud
that I used to wake from my sleep with the noise as of large wings about my bed.
And with these were mingled whisperings and voices; but no intelligible words
ever came to me; though I made no doubt they were the same voices as those which
haunted Christian when passing through the Valley of the Shadow. I was studying
very hard at this time, and in the full swing of all my private penances and
eccentric self-discipline; and my nervous system was for the moment strained,
despite my powerful constitution.

Our lives at Eden, whither we had finally returned, were not remarkable for
variety. There was little incidental amusement for
page: 116 us, and we had to make our own pleasures in the best
way we could. On the whole we managed pretty well, and never knew the want of
artificial aids. Boating in summer; skating in winter; riding; long mountain
rambles and more distant excursions; picnics in the daytime and ‘tea-parties’ in
the evening, helped to make our young existence glad and to redeem the monotony
of the hours. And as time went on, and the new influx of life and motion through
railroads and the penny post stirred even our stagnant little stretch of
backwater, we became more like the rest of the world. But we lost in
individuality what we gained in catholicity. No longer great ladies, like the
Duchess of St. Albans, travelling post with multiplied precautions, sent up a
message, which was a command, requesting my father to go down and spend the
evening with them at the hotel. This was to do honour to the cloth, while
avoid-
avoiding
page: 117 ing the tedium of a lonely three
hours after dinner.

No longer distinguished strangers from afar, unendorsed, came among us as
superior beings to whom the whole community was cap-in-hand. On the contrary, we
were taken up by men of authentic name and acknowledged light and leading, and
we became vastly more critical and less credulous than we had been. Knit up into
closer communion with the larger world outside—for we had now daily coaches and
a railway-station not more than twenty miles away—we were less the countrified
‘hoodie-crows’ we had been; and Eden became one of the favourite show-places of
the kingdom, and as luxurious and polished as the rest.

The most important to us of the ‘strangers,’ as the summer visitors were
generally called, were the reading-parties—the collegians—who came down for
the
page: 118 Long, sometimes to vagabondize and get
into mischief, and set the place in a flame by reason of their rowdyism—
e.g.
exempli gratia
, by those hot ‘coppers’ flung to the rabble of small boys in the
street on Sunday, when the decent folk were coming home from morning church—and
sometimes to read hard and walk mightily, according to their traditional
intention. We used to get acquainted with them through the tutors, who generally
managed to know my father; and we found them delightful variations to the main
theme of our existence. My sisters had their love-affairs which began with roses
and ended with thorns; and we boys had a glimpse of other lines of thought which
did us infinite good. But the circumstances which most influenced my own life at
this time were the creation of a new ecclesiastical district taken off the old
parish and the strange influence which certain books and stories had over my
thoughts.

page: 119

The incumbent of this new district of St. Mark's, Henry Grahame, was a man of
wide cultivation of mind and great sweetness of manner. He was essentially a
Coleridgean, able to reconcile Faith with Reason by the higher way of the
Understanding, just as now certain of the Broad Church reconcile Genesis and
Darwin by the elastic theory of Development. He was a ‘made,’ as opposed to an
instinctive and natural man; one who held art to be superior to nature, and the
intellect a greater thing than emotion. Of the ancients, Plato—of the moderns,
Goethe and Coleridge—were his ‘dii majores;’ and the schools of Sappho and
Pindar, Schiller and Byron, he abhorred. My first introduction to Coleridge was
through him, and he made me also read Wordsworth and Carlyle. For himself, he
was eminently eclectic. What he could not receive—as, for instance, following
his friend and teacher, Maurice, the doctrine of eternal
page: 120 punishment and the personality of the devil—he
rejected as mistranslations of meaning and the misdirection of mediæval
ignorance. Other doctrinal difficulties he accepted, as I said, by that
Understanding which Coleridge makes our spiritual Universal Expositor.

Satisfied as he was with his own interpretation, it was perhaps natural that he
should be intolerant to the mistakes of others. He was serenely confident that
he knew. Those who differed from him were therefore ignorant. And ignorance is
not a state that demands respect—pity, if you will, and enlightenment, but not
respect. Thus, those whom he undertook to teach were bound to be humble and
obedient, as their first step towards true knowledge. They must accept without
cavil such dogmas as he offered them. He who knew, and they who were dark and
dense—what else could be demanded but
hu-
humility
page: 121 mility and obedience when he gave
them the living truth?

Liberal as he was, in reference to the ecclesiastical section to which he
belonged, Henry Grahame was like all other unscientific men who believe in
spiritual enlightenment, void of proof. Personal conviction stood with him for
so much tangible and ponderable reality; and that mental state to which he had
attained was therefore the absolute norm for others. He could not tolerate
divergence; for all divergence meant to him error, and error was Apollyon.
Humane, gentle, loving by temperament, this consciousness of culture superior to
the mass, and of the secure possession of Truth, made him intellectually both
exclusive and scornful. He was a moral Brahmin who drew away his skirts from the
Pariah. He despised the common run of men and minds, and looked on the majority
as his inferiors, thinking humanity but a poor job at the
page: 122 best. To be sure, Christ had died for men of all
degrees—the Gurths and Wambas as well as the Platos and Aristotles of the
Christian world; but Henry Grahame put aside the inferential respect which it
would seem but consistent for Christians to have for the creatures who once
produced their God; and, standing on the heights of his own intellectual Pisgah,
judged calmly, but condemned inexorably, all who were inferior to or different
from himself. He reverenced only culture, and despised ignorance as much as he
shrank from vice and ugliness.

His wife was a woman of like mind to himself; but also, sweet and good as she
was, with a little more artificial stillness of manner, and a little more
conscious effort after grace. She had been born and bred a Unitarian, but had
now come into the Church; and the effects of her early training, in its chilly
æstheticism and self-subdued purity, still clung to her. Both showed that
page: 123 they felt themselves here, among us
unawakened and unæsthetic creatures, like Crishnas among the cowherds. They were
of another order of intelligence, another school of thought altogether; and
their sense of mental isolation was manifest.

They did not like my father, nor did he like them. They found him arid,
unenlightened, fossilized—a leafless stick in a stagnant pool. He found them
unsound, fanciful, unreal—painted sparrows passing for birds of price. There was
very little intercourse between them and him; and soon the new incumbency became
as completely differentiated from the old parish, as is the frog from the
tadpole. Thoughts, doctrines, modes and hours of conducting the service, all
were different; and though St. Mark's created no schism among us, it made a
complete division between the old and the new. Meanwhile both Mr. and Mrs.
Grahame were very kind to us young
page: 124 people; and
especially so to me, whose turbulent nature and now troubled thoughts they set
themselves to calm and guide.

They also introduced us to some notable people. I remember once meeting Mr. Carus
at their house, and how frankly shocked I was by the joyous, buoyant tone and
manner with which he announced that he had just left the death-bed of his
dearest friend.

‘I was so glad to know that he was with Jesus! It was one of the happiest days of
my life to feel that he was safe in the arms of the Saviour!’ he said, a smile
of supreme satisfaction beaming over his face.

I was too instinctive to understand this queer pleasure, which seemed to me both
false and strained; and I felt a disgust for the man I never got over.

Another notability met at the parsonage was Whewell. This was when my faith had
begun to fall away at the base; and
page: 125 I see
still the satirical smile with which he accompanied this coda of a long speech
setting forth the necessity of faith in the unprovable:

‘“Sceptic and septic” —there is only the difference of one letter between
them.’

Also I saw Carlyle, at the house of our dear local chieftain, spoken of before. I
had then begun a classical romance—my most important book; for I am antedating
in these fragmentary recollections; and Carlyle thundered in his deep bass
against the foolishness of going back on the past and writing about trouserless
heathens, when so much work was lying to be done in the present for honest
Christians—and how young fellows who maundered about bull-god Apis, or Pericles
and his Impropriety-Aspasia, had better be set to break stones by the
road-side—which at least was useful for the mending of the highway we all had to
travel on.

page: 126

Another of my almost friends at this time was poor Hartley Coleridge. I say
mine—for all that I was but a unit, a fraction, in the family sum—because he
distinguished me from among the others with special attention, and talked to me
more than to the rest. He had the habit of gathering piles of books under his
arms, walking about the room while he declaimed on all things under heaven, or
read aloud as he went. His reading was charming. He had the Coleridgean
sweetness and rotundity of voice, and read with perfect grace—not too
theatrically, and without affectation; in both of which snares his brother
Derwent ran his feet and tripped—but with just enough artificiality to make it
art, and lift it from commonplace into beauty.

Because of his besetting sin he could never be kept long on a visit anywhere; and
his comings and goings were therefore always cometic and unsatisfactory. But
I
page: 127 like to remember him and to picture him
at his best, and as he always was whenever I saw him; for I loved him with a
strange pride in his special notice of me and his evident affection for me,
unformed, uncouth hobbledehoy as I was then. He and the Grahames were the first
persons who distinguished me by their special attention, and who thus brought a
certain sense of light and companionship into the dim and lonely chamber in
which my soul had hitherto lived.

Now I must go back to the main thread of my story, and to the troubled perplexity
of my thoughts.

page: 128

CHAPTER VI.

I WILL give, so far as I can, the genesis of my first change in
speculative thought.

Undirected in my studies and unhelped in my thoughts, I read where I listed and
came to such conclusions as seemed good to me. In the superstitious and
pre-scientific period of life, when marvels are accepted as of the established
order of things, I was inclined to the mysterious and the weird at all four
corners of my being. Thus, I believed in magic of a stately and learned kind; in
alchemy and astrology; in the Rosicrucians and second-sight; in fortune-
page: 129 telling, magic crystals, and the Egyptian
boy's power of seeing the past and future in a few drops of ink held in the
hollow of the hand; in mesmerism, ghosts and spiritual visitations generally;
but by some good luck of latent common-sense I did not believe in vulgar
witchcraft, though I did in the Witch of Endor. But then, she was not vulgar;
and she was in the Bible. The supernatural powers of such men as Cornelius
Agrippa and Albertus Magnus I took to be undeniable. The charmed circle
surrounded by smoke wherein the demons appeared to (I think) Benvenuto Cellini,
was a fact; and I had no doubt but that Surrey did see Geraldine in the magic
mirror. The Indian jugglers, of whom my eldest sister sent home such thrilling
accounts, were evidently mighty magicians; and he who had the courage could, if
he would, conjure up the devil even to this day. I remember how greedily I
devoured,
page: 130 and half-ashamedly,
half-defiantly, believed in the notes to Sir Walter Scott's works, telling of
the wonders that had been. Gilpin Horner the goblin, crying: ‘Tint, tint!’ and
Thomas of Ercildoune, who lived with the fairy queen and was sent for by her
again when his time had come; the ‘Book of Might’ and its strange glamour; the
magic potency of that shadowy Virgilius whom I could never reconcile with the
more solid humanity of the Virgil who wrote the ‘Eclogues;’ the egg on which
Naples is built; the naked child running three times round the barrel; the
Mauthe Doog; Sir Kenelm Digby's sympathetic ointment; the Irish banshee and the
Scottish seer—all were cherished faiths with me; while the historical mysteries
of the Vehmgericht and the secret worship of Bafomet seemed to put a backbone
into the more purely imaginary qualities of the rest.

page: 131

Other things of an unprovable nature also troubled my imagination. I was
intensely fond of mythology, in which I saw neither the sun nor the dawn, nor
yet the ark, but simply the divine and the human.

How dear that little idyl of Philemon and Baucis was to me! Its simplicity and
realism made it almost Scriptural; and though I did not dare to bracket it with
the visit of those three divine beings to Abraham and Sara, still, I thought the
one account as true as the other. No poem ever written equalled in my eyes the
loveliness of that sweet picture where Endymion lies asleep on the heights of
Mount Ida, and the virgin goddess leans over him lovingly; and the majesty of
Minerva was equalled only by the beauty of Apollo. Aurora and her dappled steeds
surrounded by the Hours casting flowers as they fly; rash Icarus and rasher
Phaethon; the deluge of Deucalion
page: 132 and the
dragon's teeth which Cadmus sowed—they were all products of the border-land
lying between romance and reality, and I was never quite sure of the line of
division.

The stories also of the Greek maidens who met the Gods among the reeds, in the
court of the temple, in the woods, gave me cause for much crude speculation.
Like our own sacred mystery of how the Sons of God came down and loved the
daughters of men, they woke up in me incessant wonder at the difference between
those old times and the present day, and made me ask myself: ‘Where are the Sons
of God now?’ and with more faith than critical faculty: ‘Why should not be again
that which his already been?’ I remember when I first read Byron's ‘Heaven and
Earth,’ how the characters of Anah and Aholibamah, and the superhuman yet
manlike beauty of Samiasa and Azaziel struck me with living
page: 133 force, and coloured my dreams for many nights. But
the story which impressed me most was that wild and weird account of
Gilli-Doir-Magrevollich, the Black Child, Son to the Bones, found in the notes
to the ‘Lady of the Lake.’

I cannot say why this strange unwholesome legend took such hold of me. Perhaps
because it was unwholesome. I could not shake myself clear from it; and I had a
haunting kind of prevision that more hung on it than its own superstitious
fancy. I had just heard, too, of Joanna Southcote; and altogether my mind was,
as it were, fascinated by this subject of virgin births—their possibility now as
their certainty in times past—and by the whole range, indeed, of divine
interposition in the works and ways of man—whether it were in the assumption of
the human form or in the gift of prophetic insight, or inversely in the
page: 134 darker mysteries of magic and the power of
conjuring up the devil. This was a different thing from belief in spiritual
communion. It was what one may call the materialistic form of
supernaturalism—belief in which belongs to all unscientific and uncultured
minds, and the abandonment of which is the first step outward towards
enlightenment.

One early summer's day, I was sitting where I had no business to be, under the
hedge of the as yet unmown hayfield at the foot of the garden. I had taken with
me to read in quietness, Ovid's ‘Metamorphoses.’ If my father had seen it in my
hands he would have forbidden it to me; which was why I went where I was not
likely to be found even if looked for. I was digging away at the myth of Nisus
and Scylla, and the purple lock wherein the old king's strength lay, when, for
the first time, I was struck by the likeness of this story to that
page: 135 of Samson and Delilah. Hitherto all the Bible stories
had been on a raised platform apart, and there was no analogy with them to be
found elsewhere. I knew my Ovid pretty well by now; and immediately, on the
discovery of this point of resemblance, there flashed across me also the
likeness between the story of Myrrha and that of Lot's daughters—of Iphigenia
and Isaac for the one part, in the substitution of a doe for the one, of a ram
for the other; and of Iphigenia and Jephthah's daughter for the other, where the
human element is alone retained. With this my mind went off on the now familiar
track of the virgin births, when suddenly—in that strangely rapid and vivid
manner in which such things come to me, as if it were really the quick opening
of a closed door and the headlong rush into a newly-furnished and
brilliantly-lighted chamber—there shot through my brain these words which
page: 136 seemed to run along the page in a line of
light: ‘What difference is there between any of these stories and those like to
them in the Bible?—between the loves of the Sons of God for the daughters of
men, and those of the gods of Greece for the girls of Athens and Sparta?—between
the women made mothers by mysterious influences, and those made mothers by
divine favour?—between the legends of old times and the stories of Sara, Hannah,
Elizabeth,—and the Virgin Mary?’

When this last name came, a terrible faintness took hold of me. The perspiration
streamed over my face like rain, and I trembled like a frightened horse. My
heart, which for a few seconds had beaten like a hammer, now seemed to cease
altogether. The light grew dim; the earth was vapoury and unstable; and,
overpowered by an awful dread, I fell back among the long grass where I was
sitting as if I had been struck
page: 137 down by at
unseen hand. But this physical faintness soon passed, and my mind went on
following the line of thought I had begun, as if I were talking aloud to some
one at hand.

‘No one at the time knew anything about the miraculous conception of Mary's
child. Joseph himself was only warned in a dream not to doubt her, for that she
was with child by the Holy Ghost, as announced to her by the Angel Gabriel. Does
any one know more now than was known then? If this Christian marvel is true, why
not all the rest? Why should we say that Mary alone spoke the truth and that
every one else has lied? But spirits do not come to women; there were no such
beings as those old gods who were said to have come down from Olympus to mingle
in the affairs of mortals; that passage in Genesis about the Sons of God is a
mystery we cannot fathom. And we know that there is such
page: 138 a being as the Angel Gabriel—such a Divine person as
the Holy Ghost. Do we know this? Have we more certainty than had the old Greeks
when they believed in the power of Jupiter and the divine manhood of Apollo, and
in the celestial origin of those fatherless sons brought into the world by
maiden mothers, who swore to their womanly innocence for the one part and their
human exaltation by divine favour for the other? Surely yes! The Miraculous
Incarnation has been affirmed by all the churches; and the proofs are—the star
which guided the Magi, and the song of the angels in the sky to the shepherds
watching their flocks. But who can certify to these proofs? Why did not others
see that star as well as the Magi?—and who knows whether the shepherds heard the
song, or only imagined it?’

These thoughts clung to and left me no peace night nor day. Ever and ever the
Mystery of the Incarnation became more and
page: 139
more a subject of perplexity and doubt, and of dread lest that doubt should
broaden into denial. Brought into line with these legends of former
times—contrasted with the old classic myths and the stories in the very Bible
itself—it suddenly seemed to lose its special character and to be merely one
like others. It was no longer exceptional and divine—it had become historic and
human. Therefore, it fell within the range of criticism and might be judged of
according to its merits and the weight of evidence at its back. What was that
weight? Outside its own assertion—absolutely nil. No contemporaneous testimony
vouched for the story of the Virgin Birth—for the Annunciation of the Angel
Gabriel—for the Star or the Song; and Mary herself alone knew the truth of
things. All therefore rested on her word only. Sweet, beautiful and pure as was
her personality—Godlike as was that Christ she bore—was that word of more
page: 140 intrinsic value than that of the Greek girl
who told how she had met the god in the reeds by the river side?—or than that of
the nameless mother of the Black Child, Son to the Bones, denying human
knowledge and accusing the unseen? Was it? Had there been more miraculous births
than one?—or no miraculous birth at all, and the laws of nature interrupted for
no one—for one no more than for another?

While my mind was torn and tossed by these terrible questions, I was one night
looking at the stars from my bedroom-window, wondering at the mystery and glory
of creation and speculating on our relations with the universe—when again in
that same sudden way these words came to me as distinctly as if I were reading
them in a printed page:

‘Has God in very truth ever become man? We, the inhabitants of only one out of
such countless millions of worlds—our world of
page: 141
a lower order of cosmic splendour than so many, and ourselves of conscious
mental deficiency—why were we singled out for such a transcendent act of mercy?
Why should God have cared so much for us, vile and troublesome as we have always
been? Was it true? Has the great Incommunicable First Cause ever clothed Himself
with flesh—born, living, suffering, dying as a mortal man, and all the time very
God?’

Then, as vividly as if I had seen Him in the body and spoken with Him face to
face, I saw Christ as a peasant translated to our own time. I realized the
minutest circumstances of His humanity; when a loud voice, like the rushing
wind, seemed to echo from earth to sky—to fill all space and to command all
time, till I was conscious of nothing but these words: ‘Man—not God; man—not
God!’

The voice was so loud, the words were so clear, I wondered the whole house did
not
page: 142 wake to listen. And how bright the
stars were! Each star grew to be like a sun which changed the darkness of the
night to almost overpowering glory; and I seemed to hear the weaving of the
great web and to understand the complexity, but the unity, the universality, the
rush and pressure and stream of life—everywhere life, even as here!

Why did they not all hear and see as I did? But no one moved. I turned to look at
Edwin. He was tranquilly asleep in bed at the other end of the room—a beautiful
child rather than a youth of nineteen—innocent, troubled by spiritual doubts no
more than his favourite cat which was curled up on the pillow beside him, and
desiring to learn no more of the great mysteries than he had been taught in his
childhood. No! he saw and heard nothing. The voice and the glory and the great
weaving of the web of life did not exist
page: 143 for
him. It was only I who heard and saw and knew.

But now, coming up from the study, over which our bedroom immediately was, my
father's voice broke out in prayer; of which I heard these words: ‘O Thou, who
came into the world to save sinners, have mercy on me!’

Then all my exaltation passed, and I was once more alone in the dimness of the
starry night—alone, in the dark, and ignorant.

I flung myself on my knees and asked pardon of Him whom I had crucified afresh by
my doubts—longing only to die and to have done with all this ignorance—longing
to die, that I might then Know and sin no more.

The light under the door betrayed me. My father, passing along the passage, saw
it and came in—to find me in this state of spiritual anguish and contrition.

page: 144

When he asked why I was not in bed? and what ailed me? I could not confess to
him. I knew of old how unsympathetic he was with this part of my life; and my
wound was too sacred to lay bare to eyes which could not understand and would
probably rasp it afresh.

My silence, which looked like sullenness, angered him.

‘Why was I ever cursed with such a son!’ he said vehemently. ‘Look at your
brother there—why cannot you be like him—a reasonable creature who gives no
trouble to anyone? Why are you so foolish, so irritating? Not Job himself could
have patience with you, Christopher!’

He went up to Edwin's bed, leaned over him and kissed him fondly; and my brother,
roused by the light and the action, opened his eyes and smiled, putting up his
hand to our father's face with the caressing gesture of a child.

page: 145

I was too much moved to resent or defy, as I should have done in my ordinary
mood. I only longed to receive the same love as that which was given to
others—to be included—to be taken out of the solitude and banishment in which I
lived.

‘No,’ he said coldly; ‘I cannot kiss you, for I neither believe in you nor
respect you.’

So there it was again!—the old bitter contrast—Esau and Jacob; Ishmael and Isaac;
Cain and Abel; and the poor goat, laden with sins, sent into the wilderness,
while the sheep fed about the Master's feet and the lambs were carried in His
bosom!

For all this I could not stop my thoughts. They came as of their own will, and I
was forced to listen to them.

Bracketed with the more human difficulty
page: 146 of the
Divine Incarnation came one yet more mysterious. Christ, to whom we pray under
the name and form of; and as actuated to pity by His experience as, a man—was He
always Jesus Christ—the Divine Man from all eternity? Was then the Godhead
always tripartite? The Jews were taught the unity of the Divine Essence in the
one supreme Jehovah, and knew nothing of this division. When did it come
about?—when Mary conceived? Did that which had been from the beginning take a
new form at a moment of time?—and was heaven, in point of fact, acted on by
earth, and God determined by humanity? If not, why then was Christ hidden so
long behind the overwhelming personality of the Father?—His very name and being
concealed until He had taken the form of man? Was He powerless till then? and
did God, the great Spirit, need to become flesh before He could save flesh? Was
the Athanasian
page: 147 Creed wrong, and were the
Persons unequal?

Again, was the grace which lies in Christ Jesus, the crucified Saviour, dormant
for all these countless generations? But why? Why should not the world have been
redeemed before? There was no manifest historic reason why that special moment
should have been chosen; and for the worth of the men saved—surely Plato and
Aristotle, Socrates and Aristides, Buddha, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius—and how
many more!—were as worthy of redemption from the eternal doom meted out to
ignorance as those nameless lepers and minor disciples who had neither
commanding intellect nor enduring influence!

I carried my troubles to Mr. Grahame, and he set himself to resolve them. He took
the last first, but refused to admit that this was a subject which fell within
the range of discussion.

page: 148

‘The reason for that moment When is hidden with Christ in God. Why, Wherefore,
How, and the need which God in Christ has of the love of man, are of the
mysteries whereof no man knoweth,’ he said reverently ‘It is a waste of time,
and the encouragement of spiritual presumption, to speculate on them.’

‘Would you have said that to a Greek wanting to know why Chronos devoured his own
children?’ I asked.

‘The cases are not parallel,’ he answered.

‘Parallel in so far that we are the children of God, and He let us be lost for
all eternity because He delayed His salvation,’ I answered. ‘The only difference
is that which lies between the active and the passive.’

‘Things which are beyond reason are beyond dialectics,’ he returned. ‘We have to
deal with completed facts, not with energizing causes nor yet with reasons why.
The
page: 149 fact of the Miraculous Conception is
all that concerns us.’

‘How do we know that it is a fact?’ I asked; and again went over my roll-call of
analogies.

‘To compare the Divine Child and His Mother to the absurd legends of a rude
people in a rude age, when the most monstrous myths were accepted without
examination, and the laws neither of nature nor of evidence were understood, or
to the patent falsehoods of a few unfortunate girls!’ said Mr. Grahame with
gentle contempt. ‘Have you so little sense of proportion—beauty—verisimilitude?
But we need not go farther on this line. It pains and revolts me. So far then, I
take it that the ground is clear. The Mystery of the Trinity is beyond our
comprehension; the virgin mothers of men are myths; but the Incarnation of the
Divine in Jesus of Nazareth stands four-square to all the winds of doctrine. It
is
page: 150 the one Great Fact on which humanity
can rely and by which it is saved.’

‘Why this more than those others?’ I asked. ‘To assert is not to prove—is it?’ I
added hurriedly, a little frightened by my own audacity in standing up against
one so infinitely my superior.

He was sweet and gentle and mild.

‘By its own internal evidence,’ he said. ‘I disregard the external, about which
you trouble yourself so much, and take my stand on the character and life of
Christ alone; and on the results of Christianity in history. We want nothing
more to prove the divine origin of our faith. Such a being as Jesus of Nazareth
must have been divine, seeing how far He was beyond humanity, both in His life
and teaching. And the work which Christianity has done in the world could only
have come through a God-given revelation. I ask you to look at nothing else but
the life of our Lord,
page: 151 and the influence of
Christianity on society.’

‘Yet Buddha's life was pure and holy, and Mohammed redeemed the Arabs from gross
idolatry to the spiritual worship of the One God,’ I said.

‘And Buddha and Mohammed were both divinely inspired and divinely led,’ was his
reply. ‘Rivers are fed by many streams, and the river of righteousness with the
rest. Buddha, Mohammed, Luther, Cromwell, Savonarola, Galileo, Newton—all the
great men who have taught great truths of any kind, have had their portion of
inspiration, the perfect fulness of which is found only in our Lord. The
instruments of God are many—the melody from each is the same—and the Hand which
masters all is the Only One. Study the character of Christ. Trace the influence
of His teaching on the morality, the history, of mankind, and then you will
realize for yourself the
page: 152 Divinity which needs
no circumstantial evidence to substantiate it.’

This argument did not satisfy me for long. At first I thought I had found in its
deeper insight and wider outlines the resolution of all my difficulties and a
sure harbour of glad refuge. But after a time I slipped back into my painful
groove of doubt, and, with doubt, of despair.

There were certain things in the character and doings of Christ—beautiful as was
the one, benign and loving as were the others—which seemed to me simply and
purely human: as, His wholesale denunciations of the Pharisees and Sadducees;
His cursing the fig-tree for its natural and normal barrenness; His sending the
devils into a herd of swine, so that the innocent brutes were all drowned, while
the devils were presumably not damaged, being of the nature of immortal spirits;
and a few more of those elementary difficulties over which all
page: 153 inquirers stumble. And as for the effects of
Christianity on society—divorced from civilization, surely these have been more
disastrous than beneficent! Religious zeal has only added another and still more
pungent ingredient to the fierce compound of the natural man, by adding
fanaticism to cruelty. It has made of a peaceful paradise a reeking hell in
South America; devastated the Low Countries; set Catholics to shoot down
Huguenots, Episcopalians to massacre Covenanters, and all dominant sects to
destroy all nascent ones; it has deluged the earth with blood wherever the Cross
has been raised and the Beatitudes have been preached in the name of the Prince
of Peace and the God of Love.

And then the popes and bishops, the cardinals and abbots, the Roderick Borgias
and Balfours of Burley—men who have wallowed in sensuality or waded through
blood—where was the Sign of the Lamb on
page: 154 them?
Were popes like Hildebrand and Innocent III. true Vicars of Christ? Was Thomas à
Becket or was Wolsey a fit successor to the sweet St. John or the humble-minded
St. Andrew? And was our own prelatic Church, with its worldly wealth, political
influence and social dignity, the same Church as that which the Twelve Apostles
planted when they went forth without scrip or purse to preach the poverty they
practised? ‘Le grand sansculotte!’ Was my grandfather, the Bishop, a Christian
after the Archetype? Indeed, were any of us who lived daintily and fared
sumptuously, while our brothers wept and starved, Christians such as Christ
would own?

I said all this in my headlong way, vehement in manner, crude in method. And to
Mr. Grahame I must have seemed as unphilosophic as the chalk scrawl on a
barn-door would have been inartistic to Etty or Maclise. I had no logical
method; no reserve force;
page: 155 no critical
discrimination of values. I flung my bricks on the ground without order or
constructive endeavour, unskilfully, rudely, where he pieced his mosaic bit by
bit and line by line, till the pavement was smooth, compact and without a
flaw.

Still, he was very kind to me, and let me talk myself out; sitting with his eyes
half-closed, his white hands touching each other by the finger-tips, and a
serene smile just lighting the curved corner of his bland mouth; while I,
heated, excited, my rough hair tossed and tumbled, my lank face crimson with
emotion, stood before him pouring out my fiery thoughts like lava that scorches
as it flows.

Yes, he was very kind. For a fastidious scholar as he was, to whom method was as
valuable as matter; for a philosopher who had overcome all dialectic
difficulties and supplemented the darkness of Reason by the light of
Understanding; for a
theoso-
theosophist
page: 156 phist, sure that he knew the mind of
God, and could map out, as it were a chart, the whole plan and order of divine
dealing with man through Christ and the Church; for an intellectual master where
I was but a hodman, he was marvellously patient. It fills me with wonder now,
when I remember how long-suffering he was, as I can measure the provocation I
must have given him both by my want of scholarly finish and by my
intractability. For neither his eclecticism, urging me to put aside as
non-essential all those points which troubled me, nor Maurice's books which he
lent me, removed the doubts by which I was harassed. And the internal evidence
on which he dwelt so much was no more convincing than the external.

And now another thought came to me. Like the running loops of a chain, whereof
the first has broken, my doubts were multiplying and these unanswerable
questions
page: 157 were increasing. This was my new
difficulty: If Christ were God—that is, Omniscient as well as Omnipotent—why did
He not teach things that could be tested by man and proved by experiment, rather
than those which are assertions only? Why, for instance, instead of telling us
about Lazarus in heaven, leaning on Abraham's bosom and separated by a great
gulf from Dives in hell, did He not give us a form of political government
whereby men might have been made happy, with equal justice to all? Why did He
not tell us that the earth is not the centre of our system, and that our system
itself is not the all-important part of creation we have imagined it to be?
Galileo would not then have been subjected to the Inquisition, and Giordano
Bruno would not have been burned. Why did He not tell us about electricity and
steam; and reveal the law of gravitation and that of optics and of
page: 158 dynamics; and show us at least the way to the great
chemical discoveries that have since been made? How many crimes would have been
prevented, and how many falsehoods would never have been believed, if He
had!

To say that man has to find these things out for himself, and that to reveal
would be to destroy endeavour, seemed to me but a weak argument. For, at the
best, only one man finds out, while all the world—after they have persecuted him
and perhaps put him to death as a blasphemer—quietly accept his discovery
without any endeavour at all. And was it worth while to leave the whole human
race in ignorance, that Copernicus should centralize the sun or Newton formulate
the law of gravitation, when Christ could have done both? Surely, in view of a
Divine Teacher who might have told us in one moment of time what it has taken so
many generations to learn, the argument for the necessity of
page: 159 search—which only means isolated teachers and delayed
discoveries—is an excuse rather than an argument! And, on the plea of help to
the race to be saved—is not intellectual truth as necessary for the
right-mindedness of a man as the spiritual is for the salvation of his soul?

I said all this to Mr. Grahame—each question a doubt—but his answer was:

‘All this is immaterial. Christ came to teach us only spiritual truth; His
kingdom is not of this world.’

And I was to him as dense-witted as a buffalo, when I answered as before:

‘But the spiritual life is not divorced from the intellectual. The crimes
committed by superstition and ignorance—witness the crime of witchcraft—might
have been prevented by a little timely enlightenment. Would not that have been
more to our good than telling us about the turning of the moon into blood, and
the falling of
page: 160 the stars from the sky? Yet the
very Apostles themselves believed in witchcraft, and their words gave an impetus
to the terrible persecution which disgraced our humanity and only proved our
hideous ignorance.’

I did not say this with irreverence. It was simply because the present and
material good of man seemed to me more important than something to happen in the
far-off, undated future. And also because I was beginning to think that the
Teacher was not divinely omniscient, and knew no more than His epoch.

One day the fragmentary benevolence of the miracle of healing wrought on the
blind man suddenly struck me with a sense of incompleteness and partiality—and
therefore not as divine, but purely human. By my reading I knew that ophthalmia
is, and always has been, one of the physical curses of the East; and: ‘Surely,’
I thought, ‘it would
page: 161 have been more like the
act of an impartially benevolent Deity, had Christ taught how this evil might
have been removed for all time, rather than simply opening the eyes of this one
man. Why did He cure only that one? To set forth His power by a miracle, and
thus compel the halting faith of those who would not receive Him? Would not a
universal remedy have done that as well as this one event only, besides
benefiting the whole human race?’

Reminded that I, a young creature with a finite intellect—and even what I had of
intelligence neither well-trained nor well-developed—had no right to question
the modus operandi of Divinity, I could only answer by my one cuckoo-note of
evidence:

‘This modus operandi has been manifested to us by human media. We therefore have
the right to examine into the credentials of these media—and part of these
credentials
page: 162 lies in the moral harmony of
the account. If things are said of God which shock our own conceptions of
justice and generosity, we are not blasphemous in refusing to believe that they
are true.’

Reminded again that some of the greatest minds and acutest intellects have
believed implicitly both the Old Testament and the New, I answered, as others
have answered before me:

‘What men have believed is no measure of external truth, however great the
individual intellect. Plato and Socrates believed in the Gods of Olympus—would
you support yourself on their authority?’

‘In the confession of the Divine Life within man?—Yes,’ he said.

‘No; in the special manifestation,’ I answered; ‘in the then mystery of the armed
Minerva springing from the head of her father, Jove—in the unborn Bacchus
carried about in the great God's thigh.’

page: 163

‘Your parallels, my dear boy, never run on all fours,’ said Mr. Grahame
mildly.

‘Why not these manifestations of divine power as well as our own?’ I asked.

‘The world has settled that long ago,’ he answered.

‘So perhaps, the world of the future will settle our questions,’ I said. ‘In
their day the doubters of Jupiter and Bacchus and the whole hierarchy of Mount
Olympus were held as infidels and treated as criminals.’

‘And justly; if they had no better faith to put in the place of the old!’ he
flashed out quickly.

‘We must destroy before we can rebuild,’ I said.

‘Meanwhile the unhoused souls starve,’ was his reply. ‘Man must have a faith—that
is incontestable; and no man has a right to destroy before providing a
substitute. Your substitute for the
Chris-
Christianity
page: 164 tianity you would uproot?—the living
affirmation in place of your death of negation?’

‘Monotheism,’ I answered.

He did not answer for a moment. Then he said:

‘But Unitarianism—which is our modern Monotheism—confesses the divine life in
man.’

‘Inspiration—not incorporate Godhead,’ I replied.

‘We must judge by the Understanding,’ he said. ‘The Hidden Wisdom is felt, not
demonstrated. You have it, or you have it not. You cannot argue about it as you
might argue about a philosophic theorem or a painted picture. It is a thing
which the Best have agreed to accept as final and fixed.’

‘No question can be called final, Mr. Grahame, while there are dissidents and
doubters. We do not deny that two and two make four, nor do we question the
laws
page: 165 of gravitation. While two opinions
exist on a subject it cannot be called proved—granting these two opinions to be
held by men of the same calibre of intellect and the same degree of
education.’

When I said this, Mr. Grahame, smiling softly, first shut his eyes, and then
opening them full in my face, asked mildly, as if seriously demanding
information:

‘My dear boy, are you one of those men of intellect and education qualified to
judge for yourself on these abstruse points, and to argue with me?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not if I stood alone. But others think as I do. It is a question
of schools, not individuals.’

‘There have always been schools,’ he answered, still smiling. ‘One of these
schools once believed in Simon Magus; one gave glory to Cagliostro; and one
denied the Copernican theory.’

page: 166

‘That was the Church,’ I said, yielding to the temptation.

‘Of Rome? Yes. That was the Church of Rome,’ was his calm reply.

‘But Rome is Christian,’ I said.

‘And Sir Matthew Hale was a Christian, too. Christianity has never assumed to
include scientific illumination.’

‘No; and that is just my point,’ I said. ‘If it had! If it had given us a test by
which we could judge of the unknown by the proved!’

‘In which case there would have been no room for faith. And without faith there
is no religion.’

‘Is there no religion
in
is
heaven, where we are to know even as we are known?’ I returned. ‘The
ultimate of religious enlightenment precludes the necessity of faith according
to the conditions of our state.’

‘Precisely. Then we shall have
know-
knowledge
page: 167 ledge, which is the fruition of
faith,’ he answered, with a certain kind of compassionate disdain for my
ignorance. ‘It is the seed and the flower—the root and the tree; the one cannot
exist without the other. Here we have faith and the higher series of religious
research—there we shall have love and knowledge. The two are different notes on
the same string—a simple question of vibration.’

‘And for those who have not faith?’ I asked.

‘The loss of time consequent on straying on wrong roads—the condemnation due to
wilful ignorance.’

‘Is any ignorance wilful, Mr. Grahame?’ I asked. ‘Do we not all do the best we
can?’

‘No; some do the worst, and some ignorance is wilful,’ he answered.
‘As with you now. You have the truth offered you and the light is all around
you. You will not
page: 168 accept the one nor open your
eyes to the other.’

‘Will not or cannot?’

‘The one is only a mask to hide the other. “Velle est agere.” You say that you
cannot, and I, that you will not. You might if you chose. It is because you will
not choose that you do not, You are not the first half-educated youth who has
fallen into the sin of unbelief through presumption—who has lost his better
reason through the pride which accompanies ignorance so dense as to mistake
itself for knowledge. And I suppose you will not be the last. It is a spiritual
disease which has to be gone through, like measles or small-pox. Pity that
sometimes the eyesight goes for ever and the scars remain ineffaceable to the
day of death! Absit omen! Be wise in time and heal yourself while you can. I
fear, however, you will not. I know your kind; and your training has been too
disastrous.’

page: 169

This was the first time that Mr. Grahame had spoken to me with harshness. In
general he had dealt with me tenderly, as one in error truly—but, though erring,
one sincerely desirous of knowing the truth, and therefore to be in a certain
sense respected. And this sudden dogmatic condemnation wounded me to the quick.
For I could not feel that I was wilfully wicked. I was merely conscious of a
desire to know the truth and the corresponding dread of believing a lie. If I
were in the wrong, might God forgive me and lead me aright! I had not
intentionally gone astray. And if it is part of the function of Divine Grace to
keep souls straight, why had mine been abandoned?

There was no more impiety in asking this question than there was in acknowledging
the fact. If faith comes by grace, and divine illumination is necessary for
salvation—is it the wilful fault of the individual when this grace is withheld,
this
illumina-
illumination
page: 170 tion denied? Is not God more
powerful than the thoughts of man?

I was far as yet from the materialism which makes certain thoughts the necessary
results of certain conditions of the brain. I believed in mind as a thing apart
from and uninfluenced by matter—the soul as something that both controlled and
was determined by thought. And the shape of my head, the depth of the
convolutions, the arrangement of the molecules and the quality of the grey
matter, together with the state of my blood and nerves, had no part in that
which I held to be essentially spiritual and super-sensual—inspired by heaven or
dating from hell.

Hell? Was there such a place as hell?—such a being as the devil? I began to doubt
even these two points, cardinal as they had hitherto been. The Incarnation, the
Atonement, Eternal Punishment and Satan—these four corner-stones of the
page: 171 Christian Church had loosened so much that
the slightest movement more would shake them down altogether. And then—what
would be my state?

page: 172

CHAPTER VII.

ABOUT this time, however, came a lull in my speculative troubles, for
trouble of another kind began to possess me. There had lately settled among us a
certain Mr. and Mrs. Dalrymple, who had already won the goodwill of the
neighbourhood by their charm of manner and general delightfulness. They had
established themselves on a scale of what was to us rather unusual luxury; and,
as Mr. Dalrymple was known to one of our magnates, there was no cause to doubt
the solidity of their condition. We had had before now our jackdaws pranked
page: 173 in peacocks' feathers, and we had been
punished pretty severely for our want of discrimination; but here we stood on
safe ground, and no one hung back because no one was afraid.

It may be that the idealizing power of youth created more than existed, and that
the golden mists of time have added their magic to that idealization; but even
now, with my imagination sobered by age and chastened by experience, Mrs.
Dalrymple stands in my memory as something unapproachable and supreme. Her image
is that of the most exquisite creature under heaven—of a woman more like an
impersonate poem, or embodied music, or a spirit half-transparently incarnate,
than a living, solid flesh-and-blood reality. She was about twenty-seven—tall,
slender, with a cream-white skin, and dark eyes full of inconceivable pathos and
a kind of far-away spiritualized listening look, as if she saw what we did not.
Her eyelashes
page: 174 were the longest I have ever
seen, and she had a fabulous abundance of jet-black hair. She dressed, too, as
no one dressed in Eden; with more elegance and refinement than that to which we
were accustomed from even our grandest ladies. She had lived much abroad; and
from her Polish mother she had inherited the subtle charm which is given by the
foreign element, as well as having that which comes from home good-birth and
perfect breeding.

She was in delicate health; languid in her movements; indolent in her habits; but
she had an almost feverish activity of mind, an almost dangerous energy of
thought. She could do everything. She was an admirable linguist, and spoke the
principal four Continental languages as well as she spoke English itself—which,
by the way, was coloured with the daintiest little dash of foreign accent—a
certain Italianized lingering on the letters that was like a caress.
page: 175 She was a musician of rare force and an artist far
beyond the average. She could talk of men, books, places, things, ideas. She
knew all that others knew and worlds beyond. She was the most
graciously-educated and the most gracefully-minded woman I have ever seen—I use
the terms advisedly—and from my father to myself we all yielded to her charm and
adored her.

From the first the Dalrymples were very friendly with us. We saw a good deal of
them; and the more we saw them, the more we loved them and the more they seemed
to like us. For myself, it soon came to be that the day when I was not with them
seemed to be blank and colourless—a day of deadly dulness, to be lived through
only for the sake of the morrow, when I should go up to Windy Brow, where they
lived, as a half-frozen creature creeps to the fire to be warmed back into life.
Gradually these
page: 176 new arrivals became the world
to me. When I was not with them, I was thinking of them—longing, pining,
restless, dissatisfied; oppressed with untranslatable sorrow; burning with
hidden fever; finding no pleasure save in the books which Mrs. Dalrymple had
lent me, whereof I learnt all the marked passages, and repeated them to myself
with somewhat the same reverence as that with which I said my prayers. Or I made
Edwin or Ellen play again and again the music she played and had given
them—certain pieces of Mendelssohn and Beethoven which were to me like poems or
pictures—as full of thought and dramatic fervour as the one, and of visible
beauty as the other. Or I begged for that long-drawn sigh of Pestel's
prison-hymn, which I cannot hear even now without a swelling at my heart and
something that feels like tears behind my eyes.

When they played these things to me I
page: 177 used
often to find, to my own surprise, my eyes wet with real tears as I sat, my
elbows on my knees, my face buried in my hands, lost in a dream of nameless
yearning—a kind of nebulous haze of formless sadness, where nothing was distinct
save sorrow—which yet was also beauty.

Then I used to dash out of the room, generally leaping through the window into
the garden, to hide from my brother and sisters the strange effeminacy that had
overtaken me. My abrupt departure naturally enough offended them, and was
counted to me for ingratitude, after they had done something to please me; so
that when I returned I received a lesson on my sin of rudeness and bearishness
in general, which, with my fiery temper, was sure to involve me in a
quarrel.

I was both too intense and too inexperienced in those days to realize how things
must necessarily look from the outside. I
page: 178 was
only conscious of what I felt. And when looks and feelings were at variance, I
took my stand on the latter, and held myself unjustly treated when condemned for
the former. Were more allowance made for this inability to realize the world
outside one's self—this inability to understand that we are not so transparent
as we imagine ourselves to be, and that what we do and not what we feel is the
rule by which we are measured—life would be far better for us all, and
especially for such young creatures as I was;—young creatures of impulse and
sincerity, as yet incapable of that ethical diagnosis which can criticize
self.

Our new friends did us all good. Mrs. Dalrymple helped Edwin and my sisters with
their music and lifted their taste into a higher sphere; and Mr. Dalrymple led
them to practise drawing on a better method than they had done before. He taught
them to sketch from nature and to draw from the
page: 179 round, and he gave them hints about their colours and perspective; so that
their efforts grew to be of better quality all through than when they had been
content to reproduce in pencil, with smooth and servile fidelity, this stag's
head from a wood-cut by Bewick, or that child and dog from a steel engraving
after Corbauld.

To me, neither a musician nor an artist, they lent books—chiefly the poets in
various tongues—which widened my horizon and added to my knowledge. I had always
been passionately fond of poetry, so that I had felt as if our common
possessions had belonged by right of appreciation to me alone; but it seemed to
me that I had never understood the true meaning of even those I had loved best
until now. Shakespeare and Schiller and Goethe, Shelley and Byron, Dante and
Tasso—all took a different meaning and gained an added value after Mrs.
Dalrymple had repeated such and such
pas
passages
page: 180 sages, or given a new interpretation
to such and such thoughts. And whatever I read now, it was with her voice, her
inflection sounding in my ears, and her divine eyes following mine on the page.
Her mental influence was about me like the sunlight, and there was no hour of
the day when I forgot her—no occupation which made me unconscious of her. She
was the soul of all things to me; and I felt like that picture of the
half-uprising man in whose nostrils she was gently breathing the breath of
life—like the dumb Memnon when the first rays of the sun touched the soulless
stone.

All the thoughts which had hitherto held me, and which I had elaborated for
myself, seemed to me crude, unformed, unbeautiful; without life or artistry—all
but my love of Liberty, and that I think must come from the formation of my
brain from birth. I had been such a rude clod up to now; and now I was fining
down, like Dryden's
page: 181 Cymon—was I becoming the
inversion of Pygmalion's statue?

Again another help onward. Mrs. Dalrymple taught the rest new steps and new
dances. I say the rest, for though she tried to teach me as one of them, I could
not learn. Yet she took as much trouble with me as with them, and I did my best
to do as she told me. But something held me. ‘A spirit in my feet’ kept me
stupid and clumsy.

I could have walked safely over a foot-wide ledge with a precipice on each side
of me, but my head swam when Adeline Dalrymple laid her long white hand on my
shoulder and I put my arm round her supple stayless waist; and I was faint and
giddy before I had made a couple of turns round the room. What anguish it was to
stop, and yet how impossible to go on! Why was I so weak? I, the strong one, par
excellence, of the family—the young
page: 182 lion of
the brood—the Esau, the Nimrod, the savage—to be unable to waltz twice round a
room not more than twenty-four feet square! It was inconceivable and
humiliating; but also it was unalterable; and I never conquered the strange
physical weakness which touched me only when waltzing with Mrs. Dalrymple, but
which overpowered me then.

She too was sorry. True to her Polish blood, for all her delicacy of health and
general indolence of habit she was enthusiastically fond of dancing; and she
would have liked me for a partner, she said with her faint sweet tremulous
smile, and that look in her eyes which was like the very glory of the heavens
opening.

If, however, I could not waltz, I could talk and listen. And in our little
evenings together, when I was finally pronounced hopeless, not to let me feel
neglected and shut out, Mrs. Dalrymple generously forbore
page: 183 to dance with the others, so that she might sit and
talk to me on the window-seat. And on the whole I felt that I had the best of
it.

Up to now I had never known the sentiment of jealousy against Edwin. He was the
family favourite, caressed by all where I had ever been cold-shouldered and
repulsed. At an age when education was the one essential of my life, and
idleness the ruin of my whole future, I had been sacrificed in my best interests
and denied my natural rights simply to be kept as his companion at home. Yet I
had neither grudged him myself nor been jealous of what the others had given
him. I had sometimes broken my young heart over the difference made between
us—that was only natural; but I had never carried the blame to him, nor made him
suffer because I was wronged and he was favoured.

Now there were times when I almost
page: 184 hated him
for what he was; though I hated myself much more in that I was not like him. I
was furious against myself because I was tall and lean and strong, large-boned,
and with a shock of thick brown hair disturbed by that unmanageable wave which
broke it in heavy flocks that never would lie straight; while he was slenderly
framed and almost as round-limbed as a girl—his head a nest of close-growing
golden curls—his skin like a child's—and his blue eyes like limpid lakes beneath
the long fine arch of his narrow brows. He was of the Cherubino type, and women
treated him pretty much as they would have treated one of themselves. And when I
saw Mrs. Dalrymple let him put his arms round her waist while she kissed him as
if he had been a child, I confess I was sometimes more really mad than sane. If
I could have changed my physique for his, I would at this time. I, who had
always gloried in
page: 185 my strength, would have made
myself now a weakling, if Adeline Dalrymple would have treated me as she treated
my brother. And there were times when, as I say, I hated him; and felt that I
could have struck him like a second Cain.

I did my best to conceal this jealous rage against the one whom hitherto I had
loved best of all in the world. But people who live together, especially young
people, are quick to note differences of feeling; and Edwin saw the change in me
and taxed me with it. Of course I denied that there was any change at all; and,
because his charge was true, I grew irritable and sullen under the accusation.
But once, when the tears sprang to his eyes, and his small mouth quivered as he
said: ‘I never thought, Chris, that you would have behaved like this to me: and
what have I done to deserve it?’ I was conquered. After all, he was my first
care, and I would give him
page: 186 even Mrs.
Dalrymple's preference. I would give him, if need be, my life!

For all answer to his reproaches, which meant affection, I threw my arms round
his neck, and bursting into one of those violent floods of tears which used to
characterize me as a child, I kissed him, as also I used to kiss him when we
were children together, and dashed out of the house in a tumult of emotion which
made me feel as if I had been caught in a typhoon.

I was in that stage of feeling which makes fetishes of inanimate objects and
carries into things the divinity centred in persons; which energizes symbols and
vivifies relics, which then it adores. I remember pushing this fetishism so far
as to envy the very clothes that Mrs. Dalrymple wore—which clothes also had a
special character of their own to help on my folly. That old wish of being the
glove on her hand was no mere literary conceit to me; it was what I myself
page: 187 realized. I endued with a kind of
consciousness all that belonged to this divinest woman; and consciousness
included love. She had a certain ermine cloak, lined with pale pink satin
through which ran gold and silver threads. If I had made a new religion, with
her for the Paraclete, I would have taken that cloak for my standard, as
Mohammed took the blacksmith's apron—I would have venerated it as Catholics
venerate the handkerchief of St. Veronica.

When I look back on the passionate idealism, the unreasoning sentiment of this
time, and test it by scientific principles, I can understand how myths
crystallize and religions are made. I dreamt of Mrs. Dalrymple night after
night; but never as an ordinary woman—always with a halo of divinity about her
which took her out of the ranks of common humanity and lifted her heaven-high
above the rest. She was to me what the Madonna is to the Neapolitan—
page: 188 what his guardian angel is to the young seminarist.
She was the divine part of humanity; the incarnation of all its beauty; the last
expression of all its poetry and purity and inner wisdom. She was the seraph of
the hierarchy; and to worship her as a goddess was the necessary corollary of
knowing her as a woman. For her sake I loved the meanest creature that belonged
to her; and to meet and speak to one of the servants of the house, to caress one
of the dogs in her absence, made me comparatively content. That ‘rose and
pot’—how true all real poetry is!

Her husband, Mr. Dalrymple, was in his way a clever as well as an eccentric man,
at once charming and less than charming. He had a passion for little dogs, which
he called his children and made his idols. He had exactly twenty; all of rare
kinds and of perfect breeds. It was one of the sights of the place to see this
elegant,
aristo-
aristocratic
page: 189 cratic-looking man, dressed in the
latest fashion—light trousers buttoned round his ankles, light kid gloves,
coloured under-waistcoat showing a narrow band of rose or blue, gorgeous stock,
white hat, hair and whiskers artificially curled and highly perfumed, scented
handkerchief and superb jewellery, as if he were in Bond Street, not among the
Cumberland mountains—daintily picking his way on the rough roads, with his
twenty little dogs, all in pairs, streaming behind him like a herd of miniature
wild beasts. He had the most extraordinary names for them all; of which I only
remember Zamiel and Lilith for the barking Pomeros; Puck and Ariel for the
graceful Italian greyhounds; Sambo and Sally for the pugs; the little female
truffle-hunter was Queen Mab, but I forget the name of her husband; and the
toy-terriers were Oberon and Titania.

Mr. Dalrymple was his wife's husband,
page: 190 and
therefore I held him sacred; he was also a man of cultivated intellect, perfect
manners, refined tastes, wide experience, and therefore I respected him. But
naturally for himself, in view of the man he was and the boy I was, I should not
have liked him. He was too effeminate for my taste—and he did not admire his
wife as she deserved to be admired. He was essentially a dilettante—just
touching the borders of excellence and never attaining it. He drew well, played
the guitar well, wrote pretty music and pretty poetry; but he failed in the full
grasp and completion of any of these things. Strange stories of his personal
habits, and his devotion to certain occult studies, which terrified the weaker
minds among us, crept about the vale; but we were a scandalmongering set at
Eden, and we had those in our midst who would have criticized and plucked out
the feathers of the angel Gabriel's wings, had he
page: 191 alighted at the Town-hall. All the same, Mr.
Dalrymple openly confessed to a belief in magic, ghosts, and all the higher
phenomena of mesmerism. According to him, both the witches of old and the Indian
jugglers of the present time, had and have mysterious powers extra to those of
the common run of men; and he lost his time and strength in experiments where he
was now the deceiver and now the dupe.

He was never with his wife, save on state occasions of formal visits and dinners;
and they lived two entirely different lives under the same roof. He was a
vegetarian and a Rechabite; but he drank a great deal of strong coffee and
smoked incessantly; and though by no means a confirmed opium-eater, like De
Quincey, he was not innocent of that strange man's vice, nor of that other,
corresponding, of smoking hachshish.

If his wife did not complain of his neglect, who else had the right? Though I
some-
sometimes
page: 192 times felt I should like to kill him
when I saw her sweet, pale face grow paler than before, her pathetic eyes more
mournful, as she had to confess that she had not seen her husband for perhaps
three days—though we might have seen him, and he had certainly been out and
about in the interval—I calmed myself by remembering that I had no right to
thrust myself into her affairs, even by my sympathy; and that what she kept
secret, I and all ought to hold sacred.

My worship for her was too exalted to be intrusive, too humble to take the
initiative. It was she who set the rule and measure of our intercourse; and I
should as little have dreamed of going beyond her allowance—of asking a question
on things which she had not already explained—as I should have spoken with
levity of my dead mother. But I was unhappy all the same, in more ways than one;
and, what with my jealous fear of her liking Edwin too much, my
in-
indignation
page: 193 dignation because Mr. Dalrymple did
not like her enough, and my dread lest she did not like me at all, I was for the
most part in a state of torment which nothing soothed but her voice and
presence, and nothing effectually charmed away but some signal act of gracious
kindness and special distinction.

In the midst of all this feverish unrest I had some divinely happy hours. As time
went on, and our intimacy increased, not a day passed when we were not with the
Dalrymples—with her more often than with him, and seldom with both together. We
used to row across the lake and land at some favourite spot where there was a
fine view, or a waterfall, or perhaps a rare fern or orchid to look for and
never find; and where there was sure to be one of those wide wet tracts which
require some amount of courage and activity to pass dryshod. At such places Mr.
Dalrymple, if he came
page: 194 at all, had enough to do
to take care of himself, having the most extraordinary horror of dirt and damp.
My sisters were mountaineers born and bred, and needed as little help as a triad
of goats; but Adeline Dalrymple was different. She was like a hot-house flower
where they were field daisies; and what was child's play to them was an
insurmountable difficulty to her. Such a feat as springing from one loose stone
to another over a mountain ghyll, or picking her way from tussock to tussock
through a bog, was simply impossible. And I was glad that it was so. For then I
used to take her in my strong young arms and carry her safely across and far on
to the dry ground. I could not dance with her, but I could bear her through
difficulties such as these, and feel as if I had the very universe in my arms.
It was the epitome of all divinity—the possession of all humanity. It did not
make me faint nor giddy, but strong,
invul-
invulnerable
page: 195 nerable, unconquerable—like an old
Israelite to whom had been given the sacred ark to defend—the very essence of
God made helpless to guard.

I used to want to kneel to her, to kiss the hem of her garment, to make myself
her footstool, her slave, so that I could be of use to her. I would have liked
to have spent my life in ministering to her, as if she had been a living goddess
in a temple and I her sole servitor. Sometimes I had the criminally selfish
half-wish that some great loss should befall her, when the world would desert
her—all but I—and I would carry to her the same homage, the same reverent
worship as before. Discrowned by evil hands, she should ever be sole queen to
me! And sometimes I had a morbid kind of wonder, if she would be sorry were I to
die, and if she would ever come to look at my grave and lay flowers on the turf.
If she did, I knew that down there beneath
page: 196
dead and dumb as I might be, I should know the touch of her hand, hear the tread
of her feet, and feel on my face the quick-drawn breath of her parted lips. I
could never die so that I should not be conscious of her; and I could only die
in her service. To know her, to love her, was of itself the warranty of
immortality. She was already, herself, immortal; for the body which held her
spirit was emphatically only a veil, a shell, a medium of communication. The
true reality was the angel within her form.

The strange deifying reverence that I felt for Mrs. Dalrymple was due partly to
my age and temperament, and partly to her own philosophy. She belonged to a
school of thought quite unlike any I had ever met with. And, as she interested
herself in my religious difficulties, she naturally gave me her own views to
help my cruder thoughts. She was emphatically a transcendentalist, and in a
certain sense a pantheist. To her
page: 197 the things
of the spirit—the unseen world of the souls that had once been men, and of the
angels who had neither been born nor had died—spiritual experiences and
realizations, and the all-pervading presence of God, were more real than those
things we call time and space. She believed in the interfusion of souls—soul
with soul in spiritual blending more lasting than any earthly tie, more potent
than any physical circumstance of disruption or removal. She believed in the
oneness of God with life, of God with matter, with thought, with emotion, with
the cosmic forces of the universe. Like the atmosphere which surrounds us, like
the ether which interpenetrates all space, God is the universal medium, the
spiritual ether in which we float, the energizing sense by which we recognise
and love each other. Soul interfused with soul, and both lying cradled in the
Heart of God—minds touching each
page: 198 other in the
dark, and seeking each other through long ages and across interminable
distances, welded together for all time and through all eternity—welded together
by and with and in the very substance of God!

She was also in a sense a metempsychosist, and believed that we had all known
each other in another life—all of us who loved in this. For she maintained the
absolute indestructibility of love, and the impossibility of sundering those
whose spirits had once met each other and been united by love. Her beautiful
face took the rapt look of a sibyl when she spoke to me, as she often did, of
the glorious joy and sense of freedom and invulnerability contained in this
conviction; and how it dwarfed all the pains of life, and life itself to a mere
short day's dream not worth lamenting while it was passing. Eternity was behind
and before us. Why fix our minds only on the one troubled hour?

‘Those who believe as I do,’ she said one
page: 199
evening to me, when we were sitting in the twilight, watching the last of the
day fading from the sky and the first of the stars coming out; ‘no—not who
believe, but who know—are never really separated from the beings they love. Time
and space may divide us from each other, and circumstances may be stronger than
our will; but thought overrides matter, our souls are ever one and inseparable,
and the bond of the spirit once made is indissoluble. Love is in itself
immortality. It cannot die; it cannot change; and no force in nature can kill
it.’

She laid her white and scented hand on mine, so brown and large and bony—and bent
her head till she looked full and straight in my eyes. I was sitting on a low
stool by her side; she was on the window-seat made in the embrasure.

‘You, dear boy, will go into the world far away from all of us here,’ she said;
and—was it my fancy? or did that sweet voice which
page: 200 always reminded me of pearls tremble, and something
as tender as tears come into her glorious eyes?—‘but, wherever you go, my spirit
will go with you, surrounding you, guarding you, one with your very breath, your
very life. Never forget that, my child. I am with you always—like God and with
God—in the future always, as I have ever been in the past.’

Her hand closed on mine with an almost convulsive grasp. It burnt like fire, and
the diamonds on her fingers and at her throat flashed as if by their own
internal light. Her voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and something seemed to
pass from her to me which thrilled me like electricity. I could not speak. My
heart suddenly swelled so that it strangled my voice and cut short my breath. I
only felt a dumb kind of desire to carry my life to her hands and worship her as
I would have worshipped the Eternal Mother of men and
page: 201 things. She was beyond womanhood to me—she was the
casket that embodied and enclosed the Divine.

As I looked at her, she still bending down her head and looking into my eyes, I
felt a strange rapture and loss of myself in her personality. Her eyes were as
mysterious as those stars overhead—worlds where I was, as it were, engulfed, but
wherein was contained all the beauty, the love, the secrets of the universe. It
was the unveiling of Isis to her priest—the goddess revealing herself to man. I
scarcely lived; I did not breathe; I was as if spiritually carried away into
another sphere; and for the moment I was not human but immortal. It was a
sensation beyond mere physical excitement; and it would have been appalling from
its intensity, had I had enough consciousness left to examine or reflect.

What was in my face I do not know, but there must have been something which
did
page: 202 not displease Mrs. Dalrymple. One hand
still clasped mine, the other she laid on my forehead, pushing back my hair and
bending my head a little backward.

‘Dearest child,’ she said, ‘God has given you to me. You are mine in spirit now
and for ever. Never forget this moment, Christopher, when our souls have met and
recognised each other once again across the long ages which have separated
them.’

She stooped her gracious face to mine, and lightly kissed me on the eyes and
forehead.

It was the first kiss any woman, other than my sisters, had given me since I was
a child; and it was the birth-hour of a new life to me. Henceforth all things
were transformed for me, and life meant a new existence as it had a new message.
The sunrises and the sunsets, the song of the birds, the flowers in the fields,
the shadows of the clouds on the mountains, the reflections
page: 203 in the lake and the ripple of the blue waves, the
voice of the waters making music in cascades, the budding and the fall of the
leaves of the trees—all were the circumstances of a more beautiful world than
that in which I had hitherto lived. Nature had a secret language which was
revealed to me, and I understood the hidden meaning of things which hitherto had
had no meaning at all. I, like Adeline Dalrymple, felt and saw God
everywhere—but when I thought of God, she stood ever foremost at His hand.

How I lived then, I do not know. I remember nothing very distinctly outside my
being with Mrs. Dalrymple—our sunlit noonday walks in her garden—our
speculations beneath the stars—her eyes, which looked more eloquently than
words—her words, of which I sometimes lost the meaning because her voice filled
my ears with too much music. When I was not with
page: 204 her, I was away in the lonely mountains, where I could think of her without
interruption and associate her with the beauty of all about me. I carried my
secret joy like a bird in my bosom, hidden from the eyes of all; and not even to
Edwin did I reveal what was in my heart.

Of him I was no longer jealous. I had no cause. For I noticed that of late Mrs.
Dalrymple had ceased to treat him so familiarly as she used to do in the early
days; and on this side I was at peace. I lived in my enchanted island, so far as
I knew alone and undiscovered. And if any one suspected my state, no one spoke
to me about it. But indeed I have forgotten all the details of my family life at
this time. I suppose I ate and drank and slept and lived among them as usual;
but I do not remember the fact nor feeling of a day, save once, when I looked at
Edwin and thought: ‘How much I know that you do not—and
page: 205 how different the world is to you and me!’

The strain at this moment must have been severe. I had not done growing, though I
was six feet as it was—but I am six feet two now; and my big bony frame took a
great deal of rest and nourishment to keep it in serviceable condition then and
to make a strong man of me in the future. Under the excitement of my present
rapturous life I lost both my sleep and my appetite, and became as thin as a
grasshopper. It was impossible not to see that I was changing; and my sisters
were always commenting on my eyes, which they said looked as if they had been
picked out by hawks and put in again by a chimney-sweep; while my face was
whiter and leaner than ever, and I was altogether uglier and even more like Don
Quixote than I used to be. But as I was certainly less violent and less
irascible, they were too glad of a change which was a
page: 206 respite to fall foul of the cause, whatever it might
have been.

By degrees the rapture of my first content faded and the old unrest took
possession of me and ruined all. To be with Mrs. Dalrymple was ecstasy, but to
be away from her was torture and despair. And how could I be always with her?
Still, absence from her was like passing into the darkness of the grave; and my
old impatience of sorrow made me furious and wild against the obstructions which
kept us apart. I used to get out of our house at night by a side door that no
one ever looked after, and wander about her garden on the chance of seeing her
at the bedroom window, or perhaps of seeing only her light, burning far into the
dawning day. There was no danger of being discovered. Mr. Dalrymple slept at the
other side of the house altogether, and the big watch-dog knew me. I used to
stand among the laurestinus bushes, looking
page: 207 up
at her window; and I was grandly rewarded when, as she sometimes did, she came
all in white and drew back the blinds, opening the window, and sometimes
stepping out on the balcony and looking at the sky. I never let her know that I
was there. That too was my secret which I kept sacred; till one night, as if
attracted by some magnetic influence, she came down the outside steps which led
from her bedroom to the garden, and walked straight to where I was standing in
the shadow of the bushes.

‘I knew you were here,’ she said, as she came up to me. ‘I was conscious of you,
and could not sleep. Child! what have you done to me to draw me to you? What
strange power have you over me?’

I trembled as if in fever.

‘Have I any power over you?’ I said.

‘You see it,’ she answered simply.

I cannot describe the curious sense of
in-
inversion
page: 208 version which these words created.
I, who had been the slave, the worshipper, the subordinate, to be suddenly
invested with power—to be even so prepotent as to compel obedience from the one
who had hitherto been supreme—it was a change of parts which for the moment
overwhelmed me with a sense of universal instability; and to the end of my life
I shall never forget the strange confusion of pride and pleasure, of pain in
loss yet joy in the sensation of a newborn power which possessed me, as the
goddess thus became a woman, and made of me, who had been her slave, her master
and a man.

I did not speak, nor did she. It was like an enchanted spell which words would
have broken; and we walked in the dark alleys of the shrubbery in a silence that
was at once divine in its blessedness and painful in its vagueness, and more
like a dream than a fact. I did not know what it meant,
page: 209 and yet I dared not break it; and she did not. We
went into a small summer-house at the end of the garden, and sat there hand in
hand, till the morning broke. Then the faint flush on the mountain-top and the
first stirring of the birds told us it was time to part.

‘See how I have trusted you!’ she said as she stood up to go. She laid both her
hands on my shoulders, then drew my face forward and kissed me as she had done
once before, on the forehead and the eyes. ‘Your consecration,’ she said; ‘the
seal of our eternal oneness.’

Overpowered by an emotion so powerful as to be physical pain, I knelt on the
ground at her feet; and I think that for a moment I died.

This was the first and only time we met thus by night in the garden. But after
this I passed the best half of every night in the shadow of the laurestinus
bushes, praying
page: 210 for her to come down to me as
she had done on that night of ecstasy and silence. And as the hours passed and
she gave no sign, I used to feel as if I must inevitably die as I stood there—as
if this agony of vain longing and ruthless disappointment took from me my very
heart's blood.

At last the strain grew too intense, and nature gave way. I had a sharp attack of
brain-fever, when I was for many days in danger. Through the dark tempestuous
trouble of the time, I vaguely remember a sudden influx of peace and rest when
there came to my bedside some one who spoke to me softly, in what seemed to me a
language I had once learned and now vainly tried to remember; bending over me
and breathing on me. I remember how my face was cooled and refreshed by what I
thought was water from a Greek fountain, and how, with a subtle scent of roses,
it was softly dried. I thought it was my mother who had come
page: 211 out of heaven, or poor Nurse Mary who had returned;
then that it was the Divine Virgin who had made me her second Christ; then that
it was the goddess Isis, she whose awful beauty no man had unveiled; and then I
had a confused dream of Diana and Endymion, which changed into that of Juno and
Ixion, as the vision faded and the form melted away into mist.

It was none of all these. It was Adeline Dalrymlple; and the tears on my face,
which seemed to have fallen from some divine source, were those shed because of
the sorrow which had no healing—because of the love which had had no past and
could have no future.

When I recovered I found that the Dalrymples had left Windy Brow, and no one at
Eden knew where they had gone. Years after I heard of them as living at Venice,
where Mrs. Dalrymple was a confirmed invalid and never seen, and Mr.
page: 212 Dalrymple was wholly given up to mesmerism, opium and
poetry.

Thus then, began and ended the first love of my life; and in this manner the
Great Book was opened and the page turned down—half-read but ineffaceable. And
ever and ever a fragrance steals from that closed page which neither length of
time nor deeper knowledge of life can destroy. Adeline Dalrymple remains in my
memory as the impersonation of all beauty and all delight—a woman more heavenly
than human—ever the saint in her shrine, the goddess in her temple, her white
robes unstained and her divine glory undiminished through all time and for all
eternity.

page: 213

CHAPTER VIII.

WHEN I had fully recovered, it seemed to me impossible to go on living
at home. I had lost all that made life sweet on the outside, and the monotony of
existence within was intolerable. If I had had the hope of a settled future and
the occupation of preparing for it, things might have been better; but even such
lame endeavours after self-education as I had made now failed me, and I seemed
to have lost the key to all the holy places of the past, and to have let the
fire on the sacred altar burn out.

I was listless, inert, uninterested. All
page: 214 hope,
all joy, all secret ambition of future success, all passionate thrill of living,
all delight in books, all intellectual vitality, had gone from me. I wanted but
to be left alone, not spoken to and not noticed. Even the companionship of Edwin
was distasteful to me; and their cheerfulness under what I felt to be our
irreparable loss made my sisters seem the very incarnations of ingratitude.

Everything had gone from me. I could have shrieked for the torture given me by
music. I dared not read a poem which was associated with Mrs. Dalrymple—and all
were associated with her—and the zeal with which I had dug down into the arid
wells of the ‘Encyclopædia Londinensis’ for that fantastic learning with which I
had crammed my brain, had gone with the rest.

What a wretched time this was to me! I had recovered my life and lost that which
had made it beautiful. It was the husk
page: 215 without
the kernel, the shell without the pearl; and I was like the Garden when the Lady
who had been its Soul had died. I have gone through the fire more than once
since then, but I have never had a more painful period than this of that drear
dead winter, down among the mountains, after Adeline Dalrymple had left.

The Grahames did what they could to help me. I think they saw what was amiss and
were sorry for me. But I had lost all interest in those subjects which had been
common to us, and cared nothing for the theological difficulties which, a year
ago, had so much disturbed me. Things might be, or might not. What mattered it
to me? I went back to that languid acquiescence in doctrines as they are taught,
which is neither faith nor voluntary acceptance. It is simply letting things
slip and taking no trouble. I had lost, too, my political ardour; and from
passion and enthusiasm
page: 216 and turbulence all
round had passed into the silence of indifference, the quietude of death.

Thus I droned through the days, dreaming rather than doing; sheltering myself
behind the false plea of study, because I wanted to be left alone, but,
destitute of either purpose or vigour, in reality doing nothing. My books lay
open before me, but I, with my face in my hands, was thinking of all that
Adeline Dalrymple had ever said to me—recalling all that she had ever
done—remembering her eyes, her voice, her hair, her hands—till I broke down into
such tempests of despair as frightened even myself. The consciousness of her was
my universe, my inseparable second self—like another soul possessing me. I
carried her always with me; and my heart was like a perfumed vase filled with
the ashes of the dead.

She was the spirit that animated Nature
page: 217
—Nature, who had always been my Divine Mother, my Eternal Friend. I saw her in
the stars and found her in the skies; I heard her in the voice of the waters and
traced her outline in the misty foldings of the silent hills. She was as
beautiful as the snow-crystals on the window-pane, as pure as the frost that
fringed the dead leaves of the trees. She was everywhere—everywhere; the one
unchangeable circumstance traceable behind all different forms. In the night and
in the morning and through out the day, she was my ever-present
thought—sometimes strong and vivid as a solid fact, sometimes pale and vaporous
as a distant cloud, but always there—always!—always! She held me and possessed
me—as she had said she ever would. She stole between me and heaven, and when I
prayed to God I thought of her. She was fire in my veins and ice in my heart;
but I should have been poorer through life had I not
page: 218 known her. I can see now the good of the pain she
brought me.

‘When winter went and spring came back’—how I love that beautiful copy of Shelley
which she gave me! I have it yet, and can still repeat almost all the minor
poems I learnt as a lad, blistering the pages where I learnt!—my blood once more
began to stir in my veins and my natural energy to re-assert itself. I gradually
got back my old feeling of power and invulnerability—my old sense of certainty
in the future and my ability to conquer circumstances and compel happiness, no
matter what the obstacles to be overcome. Heart-broken though I might be, I was
still master of fate; and I had always the fee-simple of the future.

Yet, as this sense of power returned, so grew ever more masterful that which was
its reflex—repugnance to my home-life, and desire to go out into the world on my
own
page: 219 account, to work for myself and be
independent.

But how? What could I do? I had learnt nothing thoroughly and nothing useful.
Even my languages, which were my battle-horses, were merely so much literary
furniture, and were useless for the more practical purposes of either writing or
speaking. I had amassed cart-loads of useless knowledge—including heraldry and
prescientific mythology—but I knew nothing that represented money-power—nothing
which touched the fringe of any professional robe, or included the price of a
plate of meat at a chop-house.

It had been intended that I, like my brothers, should go to Cambridge when I
should come of age. My father would have given me a reading-tutor for the year
previous to matriculation; and after that he would have held me responsible for
my future, and himself acquitted of all
obliga-
obligation
page: 220 tion. But I was too impatient to
wait even the short two years that stood between me and my majority. I was now
past nineteen; and those two years seemed to me an eternity of ennui. Besides,
what could I do after I had taken my degree? I could not take Orders; and the
Bar was beyond my means. Where was the good, then, of widening foundations over
which I could never build? and why delay the more restricted building which
should be begun now at once?

Then it was that I returned to my old love, Literature—that waste-pipe of
unspecialized powers, which no one thinks demands an apprenticeship, and wherein
all believe that fame and success are to be caught like wild goats, at a bound!
Besides—it would be my means of communication with Mrs. Dalrymple. If I could
but write things which she would repeat, as she repeated that poem of Shelley's,
that sweet
page: 221 music of Heine's—if I could make
those beautiful eyes moist and stir that lofty soul with generous emotion, she
remembering the boy who through her had become great!—if I could! Yes: I would
be a literary man, pure and simple; and I would leave home.

Of late I had blossomed into poetry. It is the natural expression of love and
sorrow, and minds, like all other things, obey fixed laws and exhibit the same
phenomena under the same conditions. And being only a Philistine, without real
insight into the true meaning of the gift of Song, I thought that, because I had
been able to set down a few passionate couplets with tolerable flow of rhythm
and harmony of rhyme, my path was clear before me, my tools were sharpened to my
hand, and my chaplet of bays was already sprouting on the tree. I wrote a short
poem, which I resolved should determine my future. If
page: 222 accepted, I would at once take up my parable and
begin my career; if rejected, I would accept the verdict as final, and go to the
colonies as a sheep-farmer, or I would go to sea as a sailor before the mast, or
enlist as a private in the army—trusting to myself to be recognised as a
gentleman, raised from the ranks in less than a year, and made an admiral or a
general while still young. I was such a mere child in some things, even yet!—and
in nothing more than in my ignorance of the ways of the world, and the impotence
of the individual when brought into contact with systems. Meanwhile, I would try
my fate with literature; poetry and literature being to me, in those days of
darkness, interchangeable terms meaning the same thing.

At that time the two magazines in greatest favour among us youngsters at the
vicarage were ‘Ainsworth's Miscellany’ and ‘Douglas Jerrold's Shilling
Magazine.’ My father
page: 223 patronized Blackwood, of
which some articles were delightful to me and others made me rageful. With the
superstition of youthful hope and fear, I determined to do a little bit of
private vaticination for my better guidance; and to make the best of a certain
number of catches on the point of cup-and-ball determine the magazine to which I
should send my poem. I caught forty-nine out of the fifty for Ainsworth, and
only forty-seven for Jerrold. To the former then I posted my rhymes, with a
boyish letter of entreaty which must have amused him by its fervour.

To my joy he accepted my poem, and sent me an honorarium of two guineas; together
with a kind and encouraging letter, assuring me of success if I would persevere,
and promising to accept all such work as would suit the ‘Miscellany.’ So now
things were plainly ordered, and my future was fair before me.

page: 224

Literature, as a profession, was a thing which went dead against our family
traditions—our inherited ideas of respectability and what was due to our gentle
birth. To write in the quiet dignity of home a learned book like Burton's
‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ or a profound one like Locke ‘On the Understanding,’
was one thing; to depend for bread on one's pen was another. The one shed
increased lustre on the noblest name; the other was no better than fiddling in
an orchestra, acting in a barn, or selling yards of silk across the counter, all
of which were allied disreputabilities. It was a low-class métier, let who would follow it; but for a
gentleman and the grandson of a Bishop, it was degradation.

So at least my father said when I opened fire on him one day, and propounded to
him my notable scheme for leaving home, going to London, and supporting myself
by literature. He was opposed to the scheme from
page: 225 first to last, and tried to deter me from it by sarcasm.

‘I thought, with your fine ideas, you had more ambition than to make yourself a
mere newspaper hack, a mere Grub Street poet,’ he said, throwing into his words
that galling emphasis which impetuous youth finds so hard to bear. ‘Do you think
you can do nothing better for yourself than write poems for Warren's blacking,
or scratch up Bow Street details for a dinner?’

‘I do not intend to write poems for Warren's blacking, nor to scratch up Bow
Street details for a dinner,’ I answered—I honestly confess it—insolently; for
my father had the fatal power, as some others have also had, of rousing the
worst passions in my nature. ‘And if to be a literary hack now is the way to
literary fame hereafter,’ I continued, ‘I will serve my apprenticeship as others
have done. Sir Walter Scott was not a literary hack!’

page: 226

‘There is no good in talking to such an obstinate young puppy as you,’ said my
father angrily. ‘I am sick to death of your whims and affectations! The best
thing for you would be a good thrashing to knock some of the conceit and
wilfulness out of you. If you go to London, as you propose, you go without my
consent—do you hear?—and the curse of God rests on disobedient children to the
end of their lives. Now leave the room, Christopher, and never let me hear of
this ridiculous rubbish again.’

Here then I was at the junction of those two roads of which either determines the
whole after-life. Opposition of my father's unreasoning kind was naturally, to a
boy of my violent temper, so much oil on flame and so much strengthening of
resolve. All the same, obedience to parents is a duty; so also is the perfecting
of one's own powers and leading the life for which one is best fitted—for we all
have duties to ourselves as
page: 227 well as to others.
At this moment the two clashed and made my choice very difficult. For underneath
the fierce temper which I could not deny, was always conscience and the desire
to know the right;—and to do it when known.

Finally, my personal ambition conquered. I reasoned the thing out in my own way,
and came to the conclusion that, although self-sacrifice for the good of others
is absolute and imperative, the sacrifice of a real vocation for no one's good
and simply because of the arbitrary opposition of a parent, is not; and that in
my case self-assertion was not selfishness. The permission then, which my father
would not give me, I prepared myself to take; and I was on the point of running
away from home, as my grandfather, uncle, and brother had done—keeping quiet for
the moment only because Edwin was not well—when, fortunately for us, Mr. King,
our family solicitor, came down
page: 228 from London to
pay us a visit, and proved the ‘deux ex machinâ’ by whom all difficulties were
arranged.

Mr. King took a fancy to me. A sharp practitioner in his office, outside his
profession he was a kind-hearted man enough, fond of young people, and always
ready to assist undeveloped talent and help on the schemes of honourable
ambition. He thought that I was fit for something better than a parson's
petticoat, he said with his cynical contempt for all forms of faith; and, as it
was not possible to send me to the Bar, the next best thing was to give me the
run of the British Museum, and leave to prove of what stuff I was made. He would
help me with his advice; and he promised my father that he would look after my
health and morals.

But, first of all, he said to me: ‘Could he see what I had already done, beside
that prancing poem in “Ainsworth's
Miscel-
Miscellany
page: 229 lany,” which was—well—which was
pretty fair, but vastly young?’

Full of the pride of ignorance and the confidence of youth, I gave him some of
the things I thought my best; and never doubted of his verdict. Poor Mr. King!
Such a turgid, upheaped, colossally clumsy style as mine was in those early
days!—‘like a wood where you could not see the trees for the leaves’—like a
confused mass of ornamentation, where not a figure was detached nor a volute
truly drawn. But to me they were all monumental—chaos, encumbrances, bad drawing
and all.

Mr. King told me quite candidly what he thought of my productions. In
consequence, he went near to drive me mad by what I took to be his prosaic
aridity and deadness of touch. He cut out all my finest passages; ridiculed all
my best descriptions; gravely demanded what I meant by my sublimest ideas; put
my most high-flown phrases into
page: 230 flat prose,
and then asked me if that was not much better?—certainly it was more
intellegible!—and reduced the whole thing to pulp.

But it was protoplastic pulp, after all his hacking and pounding—pulp with the
germ of life and the potentiality of development in it—pulp out of which, with
care, might be evolved some kind of vertebrate organism—for, though he edited me
severely, he ended by saying he thought I had ‘stuff’ in me; at all events,
enough to justify me in my choice of literature as a profession and him in his
advocacy with my father. And after he had thus waded through my literary
Niagaras, he addressed himself again to my father and discussed the matter with
him philosophically.

It was evident I was doing no good at home, he said. I was too big for the house;
too vigorous for such a life as we led down here. It was power wasted—vitality
run-
running
page: 231 ning to seed—and it would be far
better to send me up to London, as I wished. Let me have a year's grace to see
what I could do. The question of permanent settlement might come after. When I
should come of age my small fortune would simplify matters—until then, could I
not have an allowance?

Mr. King was one of the few people who had a decided influence over my father.
His sharp, brisk energy; the trenchant audacity of his theories; his worldly
knowledge and business capacity; his respect for society, appearances, success;
his absolute self-confidence—all naturally impressed a man whose indolence was
his bane, and who had to be stirred up if he were to be made to move. And as Mr.
King swore by all his gods that his sisters—he was not married—should look after
me and keep me out of the destruction into which my father made sure I should
run, the thing was at last
page: 232 arranged. My father
gave his formal consent to my going up to London for a year for the purpose of
studying at the British Museum, and writing the book on which I had set my
heart. And he agreed to furnish me with the funds necessary for that year's
experience.

‘After that,’ he said kindly, and yet severely; ‘you sink or swim on your own
account. If you fail, as I fear you will, you have your home to come back to. It
will never be shut against you, unless you disgrace yourself so that you are
unfit to enter it. If you succeed—my blessing be with you! It will be a pleasant
surprise if you do—but all things are possible to God; and to His care I commend
you.’

My leaving home in this sudden and erratic manner created a tremendous stir among
us. Poor dear Edwin cried like a girl, and said that he did not know what he
should do without me, and that it was
page: 233 hard,
after I had accustomed him to lean on me all his life, for me now to leave him
alone.

And when he said this, for a brief instant I felt the joints of my resolve give
way, and I thought I would throw it all up and be content with him and home.
But, like another Pharaoh, I hardened myself afresh, and, instead of yielding to
him, did what I could to comfort him—especially promising to return before long,
and to write to him every day, faithfully.

As for my sisters, they were half-relieved and half-sorry, as now the prospect of
greater peace by the withdrawal of my turbulent personality, and now the loss of
a useful kind of servant, was uppermost. As pretty Ellen drawled out in that
quiet naïve way of hers, by which she was able to say the most wounding things
with the greatest serenity, and not get into a quarrel as the price to be paid
for her frankness:

page: 234

‘We shall have no one now to do things for us; and I think, Chris, you are very
selfish indeed to go away. Who is to go down for the letters on the wet days?
and how dull it will be for Julia and me to walk out by ourselves when Edwin has
a cough and cannot come! How can we go up the mountains alone? Who is to drive
away the bulls? and how can we sail without you to manage the boat? And what is
Edwin to do without you?—you, who have always pretended to be so fond of him
too! I must say I think you are very wicked and selfish for leaving us all like
this, just to go and amuse yourself in London. But you always were a selfish and
ungrateful boy; and it is not to be wondered at.’

‘Am I really selfish, Nell?’ I asked.

‘Of course you are,' she answered, lifting her soft eyes to mine with her candid
look. ‘You were never anything else.’

Well, perhaps. Still, I thought that to
page: 235 give up
such a chance as I had now, that I might go to the post on the wet days, take
care of my sisters in their mountain walks and amuse my brother when he was not
well, would be a disproportionate expenditure of my own life in view of the gain
to theirs.

And more. With the return of the old strength and hope had come back the old
theological troubles: and my ‘unsoundness’ had by now become so patent as to
make things less than ever harmonious between my father and myself. His method
of reconversion was not of a kind to bring us into closer union. Leland's ‘Short
Method with the Deists,’ which he insisted on my reading, only made me angry;
and his unstinted abuse of all Unitarianism, Deism, and even Dissent, made me
angrier still.

When the ‘Vestiges of Creation’ came out, our fight was serious. Giving, as it
did
page: 236 the first idea of cosmic continuity,
and the consequent destruction of the bit by bit creation of Genesis, it was a
priceless treasure to me, to him a deadly and diabolical sin. And in the
controversy between Whewell and Sir David Brewster, we of course took opposite
sides—and mine was not that which adduced as the convincing proof of the
centralization of intelligent life on the earth alone, the astounding argument
that Christ had died for man only, and that no other world could, therefore, be
peopled with creatures of intelligence, soul, or spirit like ours.

For all these reasons then, I felt that it was best to go. I had outgrown the
dimen- sions of the old home; and fission is the law of families as well as of
animalculæ. I was the one inharmonious circumstance within the vicarage walls,
and all would be better without me. The die was cast. My choice was made.
Selfish, or only self-respecting, I took my place with Mr. King
page: 237 in the coach which was to carry us to the railway
station; and thus and for ever broke down my dependence on the old home and set
my face towards the Promised Land—the land where I was to find work, fame,
liberty and happiness.

page: 238

CHAPTER IX.

MY first year in London was one of strange alternation of feeling.
Sometimes I longed for the old place—the lake, the mountains, the rivers, the
woods, the faces I knew when passing up the street, and my own people—with that
sickness of desire which grows into a real malady, culminating in death if
continued long enough. And then again I was in a world of enchantment as my mind
opened to new impressions and my heart warmed to new affections.

This total change of scene, and the influx of fresh interests included, did for
me what
page: 239 nothing else would have done. My
certainty of endless heart-break for the loss of my first love began to be as a
grave-mound which gently covers itself with moss and flowers as it sinks down
almost on a level with the plain, while sweet birds come to sing, above the
dead.

I read daily at the British Museum, gathering material for my magnum opus, and
making raids into all manner of strange regions—according to my old habit of
amassing unusable cartloads of perfectly worthless learning. Among other things,
I remember how nearly I made shipwreck of myself in the fascinating whirlpool of
Analogy. I improved my knowledge of classical times and circumstances, and
blessed Becker and Winckelmann; and I lost myself in the mazes of comparative
mythology and Higgins's ‘Anacalypsis.’ Turned loose in this rich pasturage, with
only the limitation of subject which came from the
page: 240 main lines of my book, I ran great risk of losing my
time by the very fact of over-filling it.

The consciousness of living in the midst of such boundless stores, and of being
the potential possessor of all this wealth, acted on my brain as a
stimulant—sometimes as an intoxicant. I was never weary of that badly-lighted,
ill-ventilated and queerly tenanted old room, with its legendary flea and
uncleansed corners. The first to come, the last to leave, and always surrounded
by a pile of books, of which the number brought down on my young head many a
good-natured sarcasm from the attendants, I soon became known to the officials
and habitués, whom my youth interested and my enthusiasm amused. All were kind
to me; but one attendant was especially my friend. The habitual readers of the
Museum from some forty to a few years ago will recognise my man.

With his heart in the country, and his
page: 241 hope of
leaving his hated service in the reading-room to once more establish himself as
a gentleman-farmer in Norfolk ever flitting, like a Will-o'-the-wisp, before
him, he had to live on those narrow lines for the remainder of his life. The
post which had been accepted as a temporary stop-gap when he was ruined by that
unlucky speculation of his had to be his permanent office; and the discomfort of
a few months crystallized into the discontent of a life. Honest as the day, true
as steel, tender-hearted as a woman, he was gruff in manner and of superficial
surliness of temper to men; to women he was always both courteous and
considerate, so that he grew to be the recognised ladies' attendant of the room.
His delicate little wife, for whom he had the most chivalrous devotion, knew his
real worth; and I too learnt the intrinsic value of his nature. He and his wife
were my good friends, and I used often to go and see them on the
Sun-
Sunday
page: 242 day afternoons, when they lived out
by Stoke Newington.

From the first—partly owing to the habit of mixing with all classes, proper to a
clergyman's family, and to the familiarity natural in a small country place
towards the children whom the elders had seen grow up in their midst; partly to
my own nature—I have been as democratic in my ways as in my principles. I have
ever chosen my friends for their worth and not for their station; and, taking
society vertically as I have done, I have counted friends in all the strata,
from those born in the purple down to fishermen and servants. And I began as I
have gone on—starting off with this real friendship made with the family of a
simple attendant in a public library.

In those days Mr. Panizzi—not yet Sir Antonio—was our Deus Maximus; and on more
than one occasion he showed how far ahead Italian astuteness looks, and how
page: 243 wise it is to have your traps in order when
you suspect that vermin may be about. He caught and caged one of these vermin in
the most masterly way in the world. The thing was done as neatly as a conjuror's
trick, and has left on me the impression of a nightmare. It was my first
introduction to the Italian character, whereof I have had wide experience
since.

Mr. Panizzi took great notice of me. He had a watchful eye over his small world
both of readers and officials, and not so much as a mouse squeaked behind the
skirting-board but he heard it and tracked the run from end to end. Who did his
work of espionage no one ever knew; but some one must have been his
‘mouse-trap’—for this accurate knowledge of all things within the domain of the
Printed Book Department could not have been had by direct personal observation,
even granting those ‘eye-holes’ of which there was a
page: 244 dark tradition and unpleasant consciousness.

One day he gave me a little wise advice about my friendliness with this good
attendant, of whom I have spoken. He had seen me shake hands with him on coming
into the reading-room, and he knew that I visited him and his wife at their own
home. And as he knew from Mr. King something of my inherited social position,
and saw for himself how young and unformed and impulsive I was, he thought
himself justified in warning and reproving me. As a reader, I was so far under
his jurisdiction; and his position gave him seigneurial rights.

‘You are a gentleman,’ he said; ‘he is only a servant. Make him keep his place,
and do you maintain your position. These familiarities with low people always
end badly.’ Then he bent his head and levelled his eyes at me from under his
broad bushy brows. ‘You are very young,’ he said with
page: 245 a peculiar smile; ‘and you think that you can
revolutionize society. You will find that you cannot; and that if you knock your
head against stone walls, you will only make it ache and alter nothing.’

But he talked to the winds. What can heady youth do, when temperament and
principles combine to push it in one direction, but stick to its own sense of
right and earn its own experience?—with bitter weeping, if need be, but always
earned through constancy and conscientiousness. The young fellow whose course of
action or mode of thought can be changed or modified by the first dissident he
comes across will never be a man, morally, but will remain a bit of jelly to the
end. For weakness of will and plasticity of conviction, however pleasant they
may be to live with, make but a poor job of life on the whole; and while one is
young, moral steadiness is more honourable than intellectual amiability.
Wherefore,
page: 246 acting more or less consciously
on these ideas, I gave no heed to Mr. Panizzi's counsel, and continued my
friendship with these good people as I maintained it to the end.

My chief friends however, at this time, were naturally Mr. King and his family,
and their house was like my home. I have often wondered since, how they could
have been bothered with me as they were; but they were wonderfully kind to me—at
least, some among them. There were two sisters who did not like me; so we will
let them pass. It is not in human nature to speak very enthusiastically of those
who dislike one and make no secret of their feelings; and I wish to remember
only things pleasant and of good repute in connection with my old friends and
quasi-guardians.

They were a strangely united family; not so much in personal affection as by the
feeling of family solidarity. When I first knew them
page: 247 they were five in all; and all were unmarried. The
eldest brother was the master; the eldest sister was the mistress. The youngest
two sisters were respectively the beauty and the invalid; and the younger
brother was the family pet and subordinate. He was one of the best fellows that
ever lived—kind, unselfish, devoted, faithful; but he hated his profession, and
he was emphatically a round man in a square hole. He was a great athlete and
fond of all country exercises. He had wanted to go to sea, but had been
prevented for reasons of family ambition never fulfilled; so he had to sit at
his desk instead of climbing up shrouds and handling stays; and his brother
found, when too late, that to coerce a life out of its natural direction does
not always ensure a successful settling in another form.

This brother, George, and I were great friends; and for years we spent every
Sunday together. We used to take long walks
page: 248
into the country, about London, and through the parks and public gardens; and,
utterly unlike in every thought, feeling and instinct, we were nevertheless
chums as close as if we had been brothers together.

The eldest sister was the great feature of the family. She was a tall, large,
strikingly handsome woman, almost stone deaf, and of a singular mixture of
qualities. With certain virile characteristics—witness her personal courage and
her constancy; her strong sense of family duty, which led her to self-sacrifice
for the sake of her own; her self-respect, which ran into queenliness of pride
and dignity; her power to command and her ability to obey—she had the most
ultra-feminine notions of propriety, and for certain transgressions felt a
loathing amounting to horror. She, as well as my special chum, were curiously
conservative; and it was impossible to make them believe that anything which had
not
page: 249 been in their forming-time of youth
was valuable or respectable. I was devotedly attached to this noble
creature—‘Queen Betty’ we used to call her; and she made a kind of pet of me,
and protected me against the animosity of her sisters.

For Mr. King himself I have only kindly tender recollections; and I will not
dwell on the clouds which came over the future.

In these days I lived at a small private boarding-house kept by a dear, good
woman with a magnificent contralto voice, formidable eyebrows, a decided beard
and moustache, and hands as large and strong as a man's. In spite of these
masculine accompaniments, Miss Smith had a heart as soft as swansdown and as
large as an elephant's. She was totally unfit for any undertaking in which she
had to resist encroachments and defend her own rights. Anyone could talk her
over. She was influenced by her affections more than by her
page: 250 interests; and where she took a liking she would
sacrifice her gains to please the favoured him or her by extra liberalities. She
had generous instincts, refined tastes, indolent habits; and she kept a loose
hand on the domestic reins. Hence she made the most comfortable home possible
for those who lived under her hospitable roof. But our comfort was her loss;
and, when Christmas brought its bills, the two ends gaped ever wider and wider
and were less and less able to be strained together.

I knew all this only afterwards. At the time everything seemed to stand on
velvet.

This house was a queer experience to me. The tremendous love-affairs which budded
and blossomed, but never set into the permanent fruit of matrimony; the
friendships which began, continued, and then suddenly one day went pouf! in the
smoke of a blazing quarrel; the fights of the old
page: 251 ladies for the footstools, the favourite easy-chair,
the best place by the fire, and the stratagems and wiles put in force for
victory and prior possession—how odd it all was! And what extraordinary people
came and went like shadows, or stayed as if they were coeval with the
foundations of the house, and as little to be moved as these!

There was the bull-necked, bullet-headed bon vivant who kept the bill-of-fare up
to the mark, was inexorable on the subject of breakfast-bacon and soft-roed
herrings, and allowed of no stint in quantity nor scamping of quality.

There was the dissipated young clerk who did nothing but count returned notes at
the Bank of England, and had no intellect for higher work had he been put to it.
He had a private income in excess of his salary; was given over to music-halls
and late hours; spent his money as if it were water running through his fingers;
dressed
page: 252 gorgeously and wore a small
counter-full of jewellery; and, among other things, bought a fine carved
mahogany bookcase, which he stocked with novels, all in showy bindings, uncut
and never read.

There was the well-conducted young solicitor, silent, reserved, methodical—the
best of them all; and the loose-lipped young fellow, who spluttered when he
spoke, and asked counsel of unmarried girls whether he should put on his thick
trousers or his thinner.

There was the uxorious couple who made embarrassing love in public, and the
quarrelsome couple who were just as embarrassing in their fierce disputes; the
maiden lady of good family, whose feature was eyebrows, and who would have
sniffed at Venus herself as plebeian, had she not had the exact arch held by her
as a sign of birth and breeding; and there was the mincing prude who objected to
Cromwell ‘because
page: 253 he was not a gentleman,’
kept a sharp look-out on the young men and was a very Cerberus to the girls.

There were the girls themselves—the pretty, touzled, mop-headed ones, who turned
the heads of all the men, and had their own loves out of doors; the earnest ones
who had something in them, and the frivolous ones who had nothing in them; and
one—that girl who was my special friend and studied with me at the British
Museum. She was one of the vanguard of the independent women; but she did her
life's work without blare or bluster, or help from the outside; and without that
weakness of her sex which makes them cry out when they are hustled in the crowd
they have voluntarily joined—which makes them think themselves aggrieved because
they are not aided by the men to whom they have placed themselves in opposition
and rivalry.

Then there were the women of sixty and
page: 254 upwards,
who chirped like birds and dressed like brides; the mother and daughter, who
came no one knew whence, did no one knew what, were pleasant companions and
charming entertainers—but kept at a distance; the buxom widows of forty,
smiling, debonnaire and ready for their second bridal; and the sad-eyed ones of
the same age, whose weepers were as big as sails, and their crape of phenomenal
depth and blackness. There were the half-crazed members of well-known families
planted out to insure that peace at home which their odd ways disturbed; and
sometimes there were people whose antecedents would not bear scrutiny, and whose
dismissal had to be summarily given. Like the shadows of a magic lantern these
memories pass before me, and I ask myself: Was it really I, the man I am now,
who lived there as one of this strange menagerie—myself, perhaps one of the
strangest of them all?

page: 255

Impulsive, shy, eager, enthusiastic, sensitive at all points, revelling in my
sense of liberty but scarcely knowing how to use it, I was like some big bird as
yet unfledged—some huge puppy as yet untrained. My kind landlady, however, liked
me, and did her best to warn and direct me as to my conduct in the house and the
intimacies to be formed or avoided among her people.

‘It is a pity you should be spoilt too soon,’ she said to me one day with a sigh.
‘Boys are so nice, and men are such wretches! I wish you could be a boy for
ever, then you might be worth something.’

‘I shall be worth more when I am a man,’ I laughed. ‘You shall be proud of me
then, Smithy. Wait till my book is published, and then you will see.’

‘I would rather keep you as you are,’ she answered. ‘When you are a man I
page: 256 shall have lost you. Now you are like my own
boy.’

‘You shall never lose me, Smithy,’ I said. ‘I am not of the kind to change.’

Dear, good, generous Miss Smith! She was only a boarding-house keeper; but she
was the most of a mother to me of any woman I have known—save poor Nurse Mary. I
got to like her and confide in her so intimately that it seemed strange I had
not known her all my life; and to the end we remained the perfectly good friends
we were now, when she ‘mothered’ me and looked after me, and kept me, so far as
she could, from making mistakes and falling into mischief. If I have seemed to
give too much weight to this comparatively unimportant tract in my life's
journey, it is because it was my first field of personal freedom; and like all
first things it has left an indelible impression on my mind.

page: 257

CHAPTER X.

BY the end of the covenanted term I had accomplished my purpose and
written my novel. It was an ambitious undertaking for a 'prentice hand, but it
met with that kind of reception which means promise and opens the door to better
things. It gave me no money. On the contrary, the publication cost me fifty
pounds, which sum, advanced by Mr. King on the faith of my majority, was Mr.
N—'s standing price for first books by young authors.

I shall never forget the day when I read the first favourable notice of my
book,
page: 258 which, strangely enough, was in the
Times. I seemed to tread on air, to walk in
a cloud of light, to bear on me a sign of strange and glorious significance. I
felt as if I must have stopped the passers-by to shake hands with them and tell
them it was I who had written the novel which the
Times had reviewed so well that morning. I
thought all the world must be talking of it, and wondering who was the unknown
Christopher Kirkland who, yesterday obscure, to-day famous, had so suddenly
flashed into the world of letters; and I longed to say that this veiled prophet,
this successful aspirant, was I! I remember the sunset as I went up Oxford
Street, to what was not yet the Marble Arch. For I could not rest in the house.
I could not even go home to dinner. I felt compelled to walk as if for ever—not
like that poor wretch, for penance, over a dreary and interminable plain, but
through an enchanted garden of infinite beauty
page: 259
—to damp down the glad fever in my veins. I could only breathe out in the open.
I should have been stifled within the four walls of that house in Montague
Place.

Since then I have watched with breathless emotion the opalescent skies of Venice;
the westering light which streams like visible prayer through the windows of St.
Peter's as you stand on the Pincio; the gorgeous sunsets of Naples, with that
burning bar drawn all across the horizon, stretching from Vesuvius to
infinitude; but I have never seen one to match the splendour of that sunset in
London, on the evening of the day when I first achieved success. For the moment
I was as a god among gods. My veins were filled with celestial ichor, not human
blood; and my mind saw what it brought—the infinity of glory because of that
intensity of joy.

I turned into the Park and sat down on a bench, looking at this resplendence
which
page: 260 was to me like a message—a symbol of
my own strength and future lustre. Suddenly, as distinctly as if she had been
there in the body, I felt the presence of Adeline Dalrymple. It seemed to me as
if she stood before me, enveloping me in her personality as in the old days. I
seemed to feel her arms about me—as if she drew me gently to her bosom; and I
felt again her lips on my forehead and my eyes. Then she seemed to sit down on
the seat beside me, and I heard the murmur of that marvellous voice, saying
softly: ‘By the power of Love you have come to the possession of Fame!’

The full chord of divinest harmony was now complete. All my life and being were
swept away as by one great rush and flood of rapture, unfathomable,
irresistible. It was as if I heard the primal harmony whence all other music
flows—as if I saw the archetype of all beauty, and felt the essence of all love
and joy. For that brief
page: 261 moment I was in what
we mean by heaven; when a heavy hand was laid a little roughly on my shoulder,
and a harsh voice said rudely:

‘Come, none of this now! You mustn't sleep here, you know. Or is it drunk you
are?’

The angel with the flaming sword who turned me so unceremoniously out of Paradise
was a park-keeper; and poor Icarus, my spirit, had a headlong tumble from the
empyrean to the dust!

When the agreement between us came to an end, my father again wanted me to give
up my present life, go to Cambridge, put away my foolish doubts and take Orders
like a rational being. He ought to have known this last was impossible, granting
me the very elements of honesty. But he was so convinced, for his own part, of
the truth of Christianity and the perfectness of Anglican Protestantism, that he
felt sure if
page: 262 I read in the orthodox direction
I should be also convinced. Thus he hoped that, by studying for the ministry, I
should by force of better reasoning abandon my errors, and at one and the same
time redeem my worldly position and save my soul.

Naturally I resisted this plan; for I was more than ever in love with liberty and
literature. And as there was really nothing in my choice injurious to my family
nor derogatory to myself, I at last bore down my father's opposition and won his
consent:—I am bound by truth to add, never his cordial approval. Still, he
consented; and I was thus saved from the pain, as well as the disgrace and
wrong-doing, of flat disobedience to his will; and my home-ties remained intact.
And after my people had got rid of the daily irritation of my presence, and I
myself had learned more self-control by contact with the world, and had also
become less sore, because not so often wounded, we
page: 263 were better friends than we had ever been before. My
bi-annual visits to the dear old place were purely harmonious; which my life
there had not been; and our mutual affection was strengthened, not weakened, by
the loosening of the links and the lengthening of the chain.

My life, then, was finally arranged on the lines I had so long marked out for
myself. Now I had only to show of what stuff I was made. For the rest, my future
was in my own keeping.

The first necessity was to get steady employment outside my novel-writing, which
was to be the sweet after the meat; and my ambition was that of most young
writers not specialists—to get work on the press. This gradation of aim was the
natural result of experience. From poetry to novel-writing, and thence to
newspaper work—what an epitome of young ambition is here! I could not begin by
reporting, as Dickens
page: 264 and Beard and Kent and
Hunt and, if my memory serves me, George Henry Lewes, had begun. I did not know
shorthand—which yet was easily learned. But I was too ambitious to like the idea
of work so unindividualized and a position so subordinate as are the work and
position of a reporter. I wanted to be a full-fledged leader-writer at once.
Wherefore I tried my hand at what was really a social essay rather than a
leader, on the wrongs of all savage aborigines. This I sent down to the office
of the —, with a letter stating the full presumption of my desires; and waited
for the result.

Poor dear ‘Smithy’ had a bad time of it for the next few days. For that fatal
quality of concentration which has intensified every feeling and action of my
life was then more potent than it is even now; and there was nothing in heaven
nor earth, the past, the present, nor the future, save the acceptance
page: 265 or rejection of that essay. The four days which
intervened between my letter and the answer were four days of restlessness
amounting to agony—of alternate hope and fear rising into insanity. There was no
treading on air nor walking in a cloud of light now! It was going through the
Valley of the Shadow; with perhaps that fatal abyss at the end!

On the fifth day I had wrestled through my torment and come out into the upper
air once more. My proof lay on my plate at breakfast; and with it was a letter
from the editor, bidding me go down to the — office to-day, at four o'clock
precisely.

I was punctual to the moment; and with a beating heart but very high head, went
swinging up the narrow, dingy court into which the ‘editor's entrance’ gave; and
then up the still narrower and still dingier stairs to a room whence I could not
see the street for the dirt which made the windows as
page: 266 opaque as ground-glass. Here I was told to wait till
Mr. Dundas could see me. In about half an hour the messenger returned, and
ushered me into the awful presence.

For in truth it was an awful presence, in more ways than one. It was not only my
hope and present fortune, but of itself, personally, it was formidable.

A tall, cleanly-shaved, powerfully-built man—with a smooth head of scanty red
hair; a mobile face instinct with passion; fiery, reddish-hazel eyes; a look of
supreme command; an air of ever-vibrating impatience and irascibility, and an
abrupt but not unkindly manner, standing with his back to the fire-place—made
half a step forward and held out his hand to me as I went into the room.

‘So! you are the little boy who has written that queer book and want to be one of
the press-gang, are you?’ he said half-smiling, and speaking in a jerky and
un-
unprepared
page: 267 prepared manner, both singular and
reassuring.

The little boy, by the way, was as tall as he—and that was two inches over six
feet.

I took him in his humour and smiled too.

‘Yes, I am the man,’ I said.

‘Man, you call yourself? I call you a whipper-snapper,’ he answered, always
good-humouredly. ‘But you seem to have something in you. We'll soon find it out
if you have. I say though, youngster, you never wrote all that rubbish yourself!
Some of your elder brothers helped you. You never scratched all these queer
classics and mythology into your own numskull without help. At your age it is
impossible.’

‘It may be impossible,’ I laughed; ‘at the same time it is true. I give you my
word, no one helped me. No one even saw the manuscript or the proofs,’ I added
eagerly.

On which my new friend and potential
page: 268 master
startled me as much as if he had fired off a pistol in my ear, first by his
laughter, and then by the volley of oaths which he rolled out—oaths of the
strangest compounds and oddest meanings to be heard anywhere—oaths which he
himself made at the moment, having a speciality that way unsurpassed,
unsurpassable and inimitable. But as he laughed while he blasphemed, and called
me ‘good boy’ in the midst of his wonderful expletives, he evidently did not
mean mischief. And I had fortunately enough sense to understand his want of
malice, and to accept his manner as of the ordinary course of things.

This pleased him; and after he had exhausted his momentary stock of oaths, he
clapped me on the back with the force of a friendly sledge-hammer, and said:

‘You are a nice kind of little beggar, and I think you'll do.’

Then he told me to go into the next
page: 269 room to
write a leader on a Blue Book which he would send in to me. It was the report of
the Parliamentary Commission on the condition of the miners relative to the
‘truck’ system.

‘I give you three hours and a half,’ he said, taking out his watch. ‘Not a minute
longer, by —. By that time your work must be done, or you'll have no supper
to-night! You must take the side of the men; but—d'ye hear?—you are not to
assassinate the masters. Leave them a leg to stand on, and don't make Adam Smith
turn in his grave by any cursed theories smacking of socialism and the devil
knows what. Do you understand, youngster? I have had the passages marked which
you are to notice, and so you need not bother that silly cocoanut of yours with
any others. Keep to the text; write with strength; don't talk nonsense, and do
your work like a man. And now be off.’

page: 270

To my great joy and supreme good luck, I seized the spirit of my instructions,
and wrote a rattling, vigorous kind of paper, which pleased Mr. Dundas so much
that he called me a good boy twenty times with as many different oaths, and took
me home to dine with him. And from that day he put me on the staff of the paper,
and my bread-and-butter was secure.

The next two years followed without any change in outward circumstances. I worked
hard for very moderate pay; but I was young, strong, energetic, and temperate in
my habits. To live was of itself good enough for me. I did not want the
adventitious excitement of dissipation nor luxury. My work was my pleasure, and
to do well was its own reward. I had that appetite for work which is the
essential of success on a newspaper; and I was to be relied on at a pinch as
well as for the day's steady routine. I filled the office of handy-
page: 271 man about the paper—was now sent down to describe a
fête; now given a pile of books to review; sometimes set to do the work of the
theatrical critic when this gentleman was away; and given certain social leaders
to write—but never the political.

For a young fellow as I was then, unfit for responsibility because wanting in
experience, this was all that I could expect. And occasionally it was more than
I was fit for. Twice I got the paper into trouble because of my unsound
political economy, and the trail of the socialistic serpent, which made itself
too visible for even the —; for all that this was one of our then most advanced
Liberal journals. But, as I was a favourite with the irascible editor—to whom
also I was sincerely attached, though I stood in wholesome awe of him into the
bargain—my sins were forgiven. A sounder man than I was told off to reply to the
attacks I had drawn
page: 272 down on our heads; to
explain away what could not be retracted; and to carry the — out of the fire.
And I had nothing worse to bear than an outburst of imprecations which let off
the steam and broke no one's bones.

All the employés of the journal did not come off so well when hot water was
about; and some ran rough risks:—as, for instance, that poor fellow who brought
in either a wrong or an unpleasant message—I forget which—at whose head Mr.
Dundas hurled his heavy metal office-inkstand. The man ducked in time; but the
door was cut and indented where the sharp edge had struck, and blackened by a
stream of ink from the centre panel to the floor. Mr. Dundas showed me the place
with a peal of laughter and a volley of oaths, in no wise disconcerted by this
narrow escape from committing murder. He made it up to the man with a couple of
sovereigns; and when the
page: 273 door had been scraped
and re-varnished, no more was heard of the matter. The men in the office were
used to his ways, and dodged him when he let fly—waiting till the dangerous fit
was over. All forgave his violence—some because they really loved him, and some
because he paid them handsomely for their bruises.

Mr. Dundas was a bad writer and a poor classic, and not especially well-informed
on any subject; but after Delane he was the best constructive as well as
administrative editor of his time, and knew how to choose his staff and
apportion his material with a discrimination that was almost like another sense.
He was indefatigable in his office, and finally broke down his iron constitution
by sheer hard work. What made the pity of it was, that this hard work was often
more superfluous than necessary. But this minute attention to details was his
point of honour, and he would not be beaten off it.
page: 274 He used to wait at the — office till the first sheet
was printed off—till five in the morning—and often he was so exhausted that he
had to be almost carried down the stairs.

For all his violent temper and frightful language, he was able to dominate
himself with certain of his staff—two of whom are especially in my mind. They
were men of very different calibre and standing. One was the publisher of the
paper—an extremely timid man, who looked as if he would have died outright had
he been brutalized in any way; but he remained in absolute peace with Mr. Dundas
all the time the — lasted, and moved with him to those other offices where the
great weekly paper was established; and the other was his co-editor—a sensitive,
refined, cultured scholar, whose pride of gentlehood would not have brooked
affront nor submitted to insolence. To neither of these, so different as they
were but each so valuable, did Mr.
page: 275 Dundas ever
go beyond the nicest line of moderation; and the last, like the first, held with
him to the end, and finally took the sole charge of that sharp-tongued Weekly,
when the fiery spirit which had first ruled it was laid to rest under that
melancholy monument on the Cornish coast he loved so well.

To me, younger and in some sort defenceless, I confess he was at times
exceedingly brutal, though he was substantially kind and did what he could to
give me work. But his oaths used to curdle my blood; his violence was at times
appalling; and once he
forgot
forget
himself so far as to shake his fist in my face. That was when trouble
had come between us; and it may be easily understood that this day saw my last
visit to the office. It was the rift which was never mended.

But this furiousness was his habit. He forgot himself in the same way even
with
page: 276 ladies—witness that well-known scene,
when he ran along the platform as the train was moving out of the station,
cursing and swearing with all his might at the women he then loved best in the
world, because they would not do something he wished.

All the same, he had his grand good points. He was generous and affectionate;
utterly devoid of all treacherous instincts; and he bore no malice. He was
brutal, if you will; but the core of him was sound; and his fidelity to his
friends was very beautiful. With so much that can be said less than laudatory of
this fierce Boanerges of the press, it is pleasant to record that which makes
for his renown and claims our more tender memories.

I remember two notable crowds in which I found myself in these early days. One
was when my old friends the Chartists marched through London twenty thousand
strong, and I followed—not as a special
page: 277
constable. And the other was when Baron Rothschild addressed the people from the
balcony on the day of his futile election. He began his speech by these
words:

‘I stand here by the will of the people.’

From the dead silence of the dense throng rose a voice clear and strong:

‘So stood Barabbas!’

But, Barabbas notwithstanding, after a fight of years the Jews won the day; as
the Roman Catholics had won theirs before them; and as Agnosticism will also win
in the near future.

At this time I went much into society. My social place was that which naturally
belongs to a youngster of good birth, who, if he has not quite won his spurs,
may yet some day do great things—who knows?—and who has good names at his back.
The tower of strength my grandfather the Bishop and my uncle the Dean were to
me! What humiliating snobs we are! I became
ac-
acquainted
page: 278 quainted with a few of the leaders
of thought already established, and some who were still preparing for the time
when they too should lead and no longer follow. Among others, I fell in with
that notorious group of Free-lovers, whose ultimate transaction was the most
notable example of matrimony void of contract of our day. But though those who
floated on the crest of the wave, and whose informal union came to be regarded
as a moral merit even by the strait-laced, had the more genius and the better
luck, he who made personal shipwreck, and from whose permitted trespass the
whole thing started, had the nobler nature, the more faithful heart, the more
constant mind, and was in every way the braver and the truer man. The one whom
society set itself to honour, partly because of the transcendent genius of his
companion, partly because of his own brilliancy and facility, was less solid
than specious.
page: 279 The other whom all men, not
knowing him, reviled, was a moral hero. The former betrayed his own principles
when he made capital out of his ‘desecrated hearth’ and bewildered society by
setting afloat ingenious stories of impossible ceremonies which had made his
informal union in a certain sense sacramental, so that he might fill his rooms
with ‘names’ and make his Sundays days of illustrious reception. The latter
accepted his position without explanation or complaint, and was faithful to his
flag, indifferent to selfish gain or social loss. And whether that flag embodied
a right principle or a wrong, his steadfastness was equally admirable, and the
constancy which could not be warped for loss or gain was equally heroic.

It must never be forgotten too that he who afterwards posed as the fond husband
betrayed by the trusted friend, was, in the days when I first knew them all, the
most
page: 280 pronounced Free-lover of the group,
and openly took for himself the liberty he expressly sanctioned in his wife. As
little as he could go into the Divorce Court for his personal relief, because of
that condonation and his own unclean hands, so little did he deserve the
sympathy of society for the transfer which afterwards he put forward as his own
justification and that friend's condemnation.

This I say with absolute knowledge of the whole series of facts, from the
beginning. And I say it for sake of the truth and in the interests of
justice—though it be but justice to the dead.

At the time when I first knew these people they were living in a kind of family
communion that was very remarkable. Sisters and cousins and brothers—some of the
women married and with yearly increasing families, to which they devoted
themselves; others single, and of general domestic utility all
page: 281 round—clubbed together their individually thin
resources, and made a kind of family Agapemone which had its charm and its
romance. Among them were some who practised no divergence in their own lives,
and allowed of none in theory:—such as Samuel Lawrence, who was then vainly
giving his strength to discover the Venetian method of colouring; and that
handsome Egyptologist, George Gliddon, who might have thrown his handkerchief
where he would, but who was true to his first love, and married her when her
youth and beauty had long since gone, and only her truth and her lovely nature
remained. These and some others went with the broad current of ordinary
morality. But also there were, as I have said, certain Free-lovers mingled with
the orthodox rest; and of these the most remarkable was that faithful and
lovable man, that generous and patient, loyal and devoted friend, of whom I have
just spoken,
page: 282 and whose individuality many
still living will recognise.

I also became as intimate as a son with a father with the most famous
poet-scholar of our generation; the ‘old man eloquent,’ whose mind was more
Greek than English, and whose hatred of political tyranny on the one side, was
balanced by his aristocratic exclusiveness and personal pride on the other. He
was of some use to me in helping me to polish my style; and he indoctrinated me
with an enduring horror of slang. But the crowning misfortune of my character,
intractibility, which has marred so much of my life, prevented my gaining as
much as I might by his lessons. I could accept only such things as commended
themselves to my own judgment. I could not accept them simply on authority—even
his. I therefore profited intellectually by this friendship less than I should
have done had my mind been more plastic and more
page: 283 apt to subordination. But I gained all the same.

I always look back to the times when I visited Mr. Landor as the most valuable
for lessons in self-control. I reverenced him so deeply and loved him so
tenderly, and the difference between our ages was so great, that I should as
little have thought of contradicting him as I should have thought of irritating
a lion. If I did not accept all he said, I never presumed to oppose him; and his
fiery temper subdued mine by the very force of my own love and respect. Had he
declared that the stars shone at mid-day, I would have answered: ‘Yes, dear
father, they do;’ and he would have returned, with his sweet smile: ‘My good
Christopher!—my good son!’ Thus his temper, notoriously short in tether and
leonine in its wrath as it was, was never once ruffled during the whole of our
thirteen years of close and constant friendship; and the self-control I
page: 284 was obliged to exercise was of incalculable
service to me.

The affection between Mr. Landor and myself was very true and deep, and it began
at first sight and through my own enthusiasm. His ‘Imaginary Conversations’ was
one of my most cherished books. Edwin gave it to me when he came of age, and I
loved it better than all else I had—save Adeline Dalrymple's ‘Shelley.’ When I
was introduced to an ill-dressed and yet striking-looking old man—with unbrushed
apple-pie boots; a plain shirt-front, like a night-gown, not a shirt; a wisp of
faded blue for all kerchief round his neck; his snuff-coloured clothes rumpled
and dusty—but an old man with a face full of the majesty of thought, with a
compressed mouth capable of the sweetest tenderness, and an air of mental
grandeur all through, and was told that he was Mr. Landor—WALTER
SAVAGE LANDOR—I broke out
page: 285 into an
ardent exclamation of joy, and showed such boyish delight as pleased him, and,
in a sense, took his heart by storm.

‘And who is this young fellow, who cares so much for an old man?’ he said,
holding my hand, and perhaps not understanding what joy it was to me to see in
the flesh one of the great gods of my intellectual world.

From that hour the thing was done. I became to him like his own son, and he was
my father. And as he loved me in that I was his child as well as his scholar—and
loved my love for him as much as he took interest in my professional career—and
as we agreed in our abstract politics, and harmonized in our hatred of
tyrants—we got on together, as I say, with perfect accord—to the surprise of
everyone who knew my dear father-friend's peculiarities of impatience and my own
natural indocility.

If some marvelled, others envied. Among these latter was John Forster—that
literary
page: 286 Ghebir who worshipped all the
suns that shone, and grudged that any but himself should bask in their rays. He
never forgave me my intimacy with the Samson who had already generously endowed
him with the copyright of his books, and whose kindness, he was afraid, would be
diverted to me. Probably he thought I was as self-seeking as himself. In the
days to come he made me feel his enmity; and of all the queer things in my
strange life, one of the queerest is the determination with which he, first, and
then subsequent biographers of Mr. Landor, have agreed to ignore my friendship
with him. This grudgingness has gone on to the end; and I was deprived of his
bequest to me on a plea which was either a false pretence, or an act of
selfishness.

In this fair city of palaces, where my dear ‘father-friend’ had made his home,
lived a clever old lady who had once been a
page: 287
schoolmistress and had written a very pretty little story. She was cleverer than
her works; seeming to need the friction of conversation to bring out her own
latent fire. She was a picturesque old lady, and always dressed in very light,
soft grey with a profusion of white lace. After seventy, she said, all women
should dress in light grey and wear much white lace; so, giving the sense of
freshness and cleanliness. After fifty and before seventy they ought to wear
black. She was a great friend of Mr. Landor's; but she one day offended his
susceptibilities, and he broke with her, never to renew his acquaintance.
Courteous as he was to women—taking them downstairs and standing bareheaded by
the door of their carriages, according to the manners of the old school, and of
Italy—he could be as vehement to them as to men when he was offended; and to
affront him once was to lose him for ever.

page: 288

My first friend in the city was that learned and fastidious Dr. Devise, who had
read too much for any good work of his own to be possible. He had, as it were,
smothered his originality by the enormous mass of other men's thoughts with
which he had loaded his brain. He was intent on writing a book which should
demolish all religious superstition; and he had already been many years about
it. The first chapter only was finished. This he had had printed as a ‘brick,’
for private circulation. I cannot say that I was impressed by it. Seeking to be
comprehensive, it was wire-drawn and diluted. It read like a list of synonyms,
or a catalogue of intellectual processes and in the matter of literary style it
was singularly poor.

Dr. Devise was a man who had extreme fascination for some people. One of our
greatest celebrities, when in the Ugly Duck stage of her existence and before
she had
page: 289 joined her kindred Swans, had wanted
to dedicate her life to him. But too many other feminine interests were already
established to allow of the introduction of an outsider; and the friendship came
to a stormy end, after a more than ordinarily ardent beginning. His house was my
first sojourning place in Bath; but I annoyed him too, by my confessed
preference for the ‘Father’; and I fear he thought me both ungrateful and a
fool.

Anyhow, he gave me one of those moral shocks which are the birth-hours of new
experience to youth, when, one day, he gently chid me for loving Mr. Landor
better than I loved him. Still gentle, but cynical as well as
half-compassionate, he went on to remind me that Mr. Landor had no money to
leave; that he had even given the copyright of his works to John Forster—as I
already knew—and that his very pictures, of which he was so proud, were for the
most part rubbish.

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I never forgave this insinuation. And it did not mend matters when he spoke of
his own ampler means, and how he was able both to leave his family well provided
for and to remember congenial outsiders into the bargain. I never cared for him
after this. At no time of my life have I been self-seeking in friendship; and
legacies have come into my calculations as little as the chance of a peerage or
an offer of the Garter. And if this be so now, when I have learned the value of
money, what was it then, when I was still too young and impulsive to calculate
or foresee anything whatever? For all his learning and hospitality and undoubted
qualities, there was ever in my mind after this a repugnance to Dr. Devise which
lasted to the end.

But I liked his cheerful, patient, blind wife, with her graceful little
courtesies, pretty flatteries, and craving for sympathy. And her energetic
sister-in-law, with her
page: 291 strong brain and heart
of purest gold, was ‘Aunt Susan’ to me, as she was to some others. She was a
passionate propagandist of freethought, and was never so happy as when giving
away the small tracts and bigger books which were her artillery against the
strongholds of superstition. Mr. Scott, of Ramsgate, found her a valuable
auxiliary; and she welcomed every new light with almost youthful enthusiasm. She
was one of the bravest of the morally brave; for she suffered keenly from that
kind of local ostracism, consequent on her unorthodox opinions, which in a
manner isolated her and reduced her society to a few—fit, if you will, but few
all the same. Yet she never relaxed her propagandism, which was as much part of
her philanthropy as was her more direct benevolence in the matters of food and
flannel; and she dug her own social grave unflinchingly, if with some sighs and
not a few heart-aches.

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Dr. Devise's soft-voiced, fair-skinned daughter was also one of my chosen friends
at this time. Her charm lay in her marvellous power of sympathy and almost
godlike strength of consolation. She was like a younger daughter of Demeter, in
whose soft white arms the troubled might lie and be at rest. In my own dark
hour, which came upon me a little later, she was of divine and infinite
consolation. And others found in her the exquisite charm that was so patent and
potent to me.

A kind of outlying member of this remarkable group was a certain refined and
thoughtful man who was in those days the ideal poet and student—as he is now the
ideal scholar and philosopher. He was of all the men known to me one of the most
graceful in mind, most cultivated in intellect, most modest in bearing, most
accurate in learning, and of the purest kind of morale incarnate in human form.
He was
page: 293 then in Orders. Subsequently he broke
his chains and came out into freedom and the light.

There were also two learned sisters who lived near my doctor friend, and carried
to him a chilly worship like incense smouldering in a censer of ice. They awed
me by their fearful superiority. They were women who had the most extraordinary
power of dwarfing all other pretensions and degrading you both in your own
esteem and in the eyes of others. And they used this power unsparingly. They had
not lived down the softer follies and tender frailties of youth, for they had
never had any to live down, being of the tribe of the ‘unco' guid’—the ‘prigs in
petticoats’—from the beginning. Self-centred, bloodless, intellectual,
sarcastic, unemotional, they had no sympathy with the sorrows which sprung from
passion and no compassion for failure. They were like a couple of old
Egyptian
page: 294 goddesses shot through with
Voltaire—Pasht for the one, the Sphinx for the other—while behind the mask of
each peered the keen satirical and mocking face of the author of ‘Candide.’ They
thought me abominable, and I thought them dreadful; and there was always war
between us, such as Tieck or Hoffmann would have made between a couple of
Ice-maidens and the Fire-king.

Here, I made the acquaintance of Mr. Empson, that pre-historic æsthete who did
his best to create a taste for minor ornamentation by skilfully combined and
original adaptations, and whose bric-à-brac shop was a favourite lounge with the
best people in Bath. My dear old ‘father’ was frequently there, and I with him.
Mr. Empson was eager for lengths of old brocades with which to line the covers
of his more valuable books, or to drape as curtains about his statuettes. He was
wonderfully sleek and silky in his
page: 295 manners;
but I saw the reverse of the polished medal when, one day, he turned on me with
a sudden outburst of astounding ferocity, because I compassionated him for some
rheumatic ailment of which he complained.

‘How can you, a strong young fellow in the beautiful morning of life, care for
what an old man like me suffers? I hate humbug!’ he said savagely.

On which I fired up and told him that he was both impolite and inhuman, and that
he had no right to question my sincerity unless he had found me already less
than honest. But these sleek, silky, smooth-mannered people are so often savage
when touched beneath the skin!

Then I knew the charming family of that delightful Irish actor who went down in
the ill-fated President. The mother had a mania for birds and small
dogs, and the girls were among the prettiest in Bath.
page: 296 They were of three distinct types—‘petillante,’
statuesque, elfin—Rosina, Galatea, Fenella; and each was perfect in her
kind.

There was also one man of whom I will only say that I thought him then, and I
think him now, one of the Best I have ever known—one of those who make the
honour of their generation, and who help to keep society sweet and pure, because
entirely governed by principle. With him it was religious principle, which he
translated into practical and vital morals. He and my brother Godfrey stand side
by side under the measuring standard of human worth. The one has touched the
heights by faith, the other by honour. The one has learned self-command by
obedience, the other by self-respect. Neither could commit a dishonourable
action, were the noose knotted and life to be the forfeit; but the one would
gather his strength from religion, the other from heroism—the one would die
page: 297 with the fervour of a martyr, the other with
the fortitude of a Stoic.

All the same, differences of method notwithstanding, they stand shoulder to
shoulder on the green plot of human nobleness; and no one can say that the one
is higher than the other—the one better or braver or stronger than the other.
They have come to the same point by different roads; and the modes of faith for
which graceless zealots fight are emphatically of no account with such as these,
whose lives are so eminently in the right.